by Rex Miller
This was a place where hardworking men, or hardly working men in some instances, came to buy bait or ammo, swap guns or sea stories, drink a few brews, bitch or brag about crops and women, and they were not overly interested in their fellows. Chaingang would draw stares anywhere, but if there was a place he could halfway blend in, rather fortuitously he'd found it. The Gas Eats Bait shop had added its wares, as the sign outside showed, incrementally. Guns had found their way to this casual marketplace, and when the beast had calmed its hunger, slaked its thirst, and decided to chance tanking up the hot car as well, it was toward weaponry his attention was drawn.
The duffel was as much ordnance and firearms as anything else, but he never missed an opportunity to stock up on accessible tools when they were so easy to acquire off the books. There was a modest rack of shotguns and rifles for sale. He hated rifles and immediately dismissed them. A shotgun, properly reworked, could be a pleasantly effective up-close tool that was as disposable as such weapons could get. He passed over two expensive models for three used shotguns that could serve his needs: a Mossberg, a Remington, and a Winchester.
He asked to look at the Mossberg, and behind him a loud voice said, “That's a damn fine shotgun, son. That's my gun. I slayed me some damn birds with that sumbitch. If I hadn't got laid off at Ryker's I'd never sold it. Here I am doing $18,590, okay? This year Ryker's works me a hundred and seventeen hours more but they pay me $17,300. Are you following this shit? Can you believe this damn shit?” The man behind him had turned from the Goliath-size figure, no longer interested in what he believed, and was telling the other guys in the store the old complaint. A television played a soap opera loudly from a back room. Chaingang put the Mossberg down and examined the Remington's action. He didn't trust it at all. “I need $17,300 and a hundred and seventeen more hours like I need another crack in my ass, okay?” He was nearly as tall as Bunkowski, but trim and hard, sunburnt a deep rosewood color, white hair, with dark Elvis burns and Coors on his belt buckle. Everybody but Chaingang wore a cap with advertising on it.
The door crashed open and a young, wiseass-looking guy strode in, wearing metal-shod cowboy boots, slapping a long leather quirt against his leg. He looked like somebody spoiling for a fight.
“Gimme a pint a’ blackjack,” he snarled.
Two young men on horses were visible through the open front door. The three had ridden up and nobody inside except Bunkowski had heard them. He was examining the Winchester twelve gauge. The punk paid for his Jack Daniel's and stomped out, not bothering to close the door. Chaingang saw him leap onto the nearest horse and use the quirt on it, unnecessarily, as the trio rode off.
“Fucker killed two horses last year, I heard. Mean mutha friggin’ sumbitch. Anyway, Rykers is working me a hundred—"
“How much?” Chaingang asked in a deep basso rumble. The proprietor told him, and was rewarded with more filthy bills.
“I can always drive produce for Lamonica or the Wallace boys, but shit, they want you to go outside or run around them scales and you can't do that shit now and keep your friggin’ CDL."
“Give me a box of shells. Double 0."
This took the man aback. Nobody bought double 0. “I don't have an entire box. I got, oh, maybe ten or so.” He pawed through an open box of loose shells.
“I'll take what you have."
“You don't pay a damn speeding ticket they'll jerk your CDL now. Hell, I'd work for Lamonica but he's liable to tell you to go run outside the friggin’ scales, you know?"
Chaingang pocketed his change, and asked the proprietor in a quieter voice, “That kid on the horse? What's that boy's name?” His tone implying he'd known the fellow and forgotten his name.
“Jerry, you mean? The Rice boy?"
“Jerry Rice, sure. Does he still live in town?"
“Naw,” the man eyed him suspiciously. “He's never lived in town that I knowed of. He lives right down at the end of the gravel road where he's always lived.” The older man pointed.
“Ah! He ain't who I was thinkin’ of, then,” Chaingang said conversationally, making small talk until he could see the suspicion drain from the man's eyes. When the mood struck him he could be notoriously deft as a con artist, even muster an array of rather disarming social skills, bolstered by the unique talents of a natural actor, the unerring ear of a mimic, and his eidetic recall of stored observational minutiae. When he determined it was safe to do so, he took his purchases out to the car and drove away, not turning down the gravel road. That would come later, after dark.
The rain opened up again, splashing onto the stolen car. He was pleased in one way, as he'd neglected to clean off the windshield or refill the container of wiper fluid under the hood. However, it would also make the tags easier to read. He'd changed them once, but by now both sets would doubtless be on the hotsheet. He needed a fresh ride as soon as it became feasible. He needed soap. A real bed. Real food. His stomach rumbled, and seemed to be answered by a thunderclap.
The storms had moved with him, and he remembered the slick bridges, rain-soaked highways, and limited visibility that preceded the run-in with the drunk driver. It had rained since he'd left Kansas City. He normally enjoyed driving in rain, but the wet roads had probably helped bring about the mishap. The weather patterns, moving from the west, had accompanied his journey; it appeared that he'd brought the flooding rivers with him.
43
Bayou City
She woke up running from someone and successfully getting away and was almost free of her pursuer when the jarring, jangling telephone caused her to sit bolt upright, caught in a tangle of covers, completely disoriented and befogged, lurching around to find the unfamiliar instrument and snatching out at it as she tried to unfog her sleep-drugged mind.
“'lo."
“Mizz Kamen?” A voice she didn't recognize.
“This is she speaking,” she tried to say through a mouth like cotton.
“Did I disturb you, ma'am?"
“No. No. Not at all."
“Good. I wanted to see if by any chance you'd heard anything about your father's whereabouts since you were in Chief Randall's office?” The voice sounded distant and hollow.
“No. I haven't heard anything. Who did you say this was?” She was still groggy, she noticed, as her fingers fumbled instinctively to remove an earring she wasn't wearing as she tried to press the phone closer.
“This is Sheriff Pritchett, Mizz Kamen, I'm...” Whatever the man said next was lost in an electro-spasm of crackling static.
“Hello? Can you hear me?” she asked.
“I think the line's about to go, ma'am. Can you hear me okay?"
“Fine. Did you hear anything about Da—my father?"
“Surely haven't. We're intensifying our search. I take it you haven't heard anything more?” he asked her for the second time, a hard cop edge to his tone.
“No. I'd certainly call the authorities if I learned anything—"
“We've placed him in New Madrid,” the sheriff continued smoothly, his voice growing fainter as he spoke, “but after that we've been—” crackle “—cover where he went next. We'll find him. Listen, uh, what exactly did Mr. Kamen say to you the last time you had contact, as far as any plans he had, or what other cities he might be traveling to?"
“Well, let's see. He said he was going to head back Monday at the latest. He was going back to St. Louis first and he said he had some business there, and then he was coming home."
“Where was he going in St. Louis?"
“He didn't tell me,” Sharon said.
“Was that usual for your father? Didn't he ordinarily tell you where he was going when he went out of town?"
“He always made it a rule not to discuss the cases—his investigations."
“Would there be anyone he might have talked with down here beside Chief Randall and myself, in law enforcement? For instance, did he mention any contacts in New Madrid or Clearwater counties?"
“No, I can't think of anyone.�
� She'd never heard him speak of his unofficial contacts, what she'd once teasingly called the Old Goy Network.
“Okay. So he was going to St. Louis today, he said, then coming back home immediately. Is it possible he'd come back tonight and not phone in the interim if he'd had a change in where he went?"
“Yes, I suppose so. It isn't likely, but it's certainly possible. He didn't plan to come home that soon anyway, Sheriff. He was going to St. Louis today to take care of some business, then coming on back to Kansas City either Wednesday or Thursday, I think he said.” It was hard to recall specific conversations, and she was beginning to doubt her memory.
“But if he drew a blank on his investigation, he could have headed on up to St. Louis, huh?"
“His things are still here. I think something's happened to him.” It made Sharon suddenly cold to put voice to it. She was wide awake and frightened.
“All right. Well, stay in touch with me and we'll be talking soon."
She assured the sheriff she would, as the spitting phone line went dead in her hand.
Her wristwatch revealed an astonishing piece of information, as she glanced at it to check the time. It was morning. How long had she slept? Twelve, thirteen hours? She rubbed sleep out of her eyes and walked over to the heavy curtains, peering around into the parking lot and street beyond. Rain was sluicing down in torrents, and she'd been in such a fog she hadn't realized it, though it was audible inside the motel room. The fact she wasn't totally functioning at the top of her abilities descended on her like cold rain. She watched a vehicle splash by and thought, Daddy's out in that mess, somewhere.
Sharon went in and peed, came back, sat on the edge of the bed, and tried to marshal her strength and street smarts. There was work to be done. She had to snap out of it.
She forced herself into action, picking up the phone and asking for Raymond's number. It rang and rang. While she listened to the buzzing, crackling line, she made a scribbled note, something she'd forgotten to tell the sheriff a minute ago. Called Jimmie Randall, two other county sheriffs, and, finally, the FBI office in Cape Girardeau. Dressed. Wrote a letter. Back to the phone. Tried Meara again. Phoned Kansas City, a couple of numbers in St. Louis, and Meara's line a third time. The ringing was loud and hollow, and nobody answered.
“Office,” the woman at the motel desk said for the umpteenth time.
“I was wondering, do you know where Mr. Ray Meara's farm is located?"
“Yes."
“Could you give me directions on how to get there? I know some of the roads are getting bad."
“Highway 80's closed, I just heard this morning."
“I see."
“I can tell you how to go around the back way. It's a little longer but you shouldn't have to drive through much water."
“Yeah.” Wonderful. “Please, I'd appreciate it."
“Well, first go through town to 102 and take a right at the levee,” she began. Fine, Sharon thought, but what's a levee? Her mind simply would not kick in. She would kill for a cup of strong, black coffee. “Then you take the second gravel road after 740 and when you come to the next fork—"
The more convinced Sharon became that something had happened to her father, the more she tried to push the bad thoughts out of her mind. She could almost step back and watch herself begin to deal with it the same way she had with the shooting at the shelter. By simply shutting down.
She sat by the phone, wondering if she should try Ray again, listening to the hum of traffic moving through the rain. She kept thinking about the scarred, solid face of her rescuer as he took her arm and lifted her off the hard pavement, pulling her to safety.
Sharon rejected the notion, but she imagined she could conjure up this strange man's smell, the powerful and distinctive aroma of a pair of leather cowboy chaps, she decided. A dumb western fantasy she was having. Romance on the Range. Even though she rejected the notion of Meara out of hand, laughed at the idea of anything between them, and thought he could never mean anything to her, he was in her nose like a fragrance she craved but couldn't afford. Go figure.
She forced herself into action, slamming the door and dashing for the car. The rain was solidifying, a soaking downpour, and as she started the vehicle and pulled away, the windshield wipers were already fighting to keep the glass clear enough for her to see.
By the time she was through Bayou City, heading east, she hoped, the blades had been turned to maximum speed and they responded angrily, with a slapping noise that sounded inanely like hyper-wiper, hyper-wiper, hyper-wiper. She realized two things: she was psyching herself out, and she was driving way the hell too fast.
Sharon slowed the car, making a conscious effort to relax her mind. After a few more miles there was nothing. The farmhouses stopped and there was only the white line and blacktop, and the silvery gray of the rain-drenched fields. No farmers or tractors. No traffic. Just the road and the sound of the wipers, the song of the tires, and steady, hard rain against a sky the color of a destroyer. Visibility extremely limited.
About the time she started to consider pulling over, the rain stopped, and she quickly cut the annoying wipers. Not a car or truck was on the road beside her. Zero population. Just soybean and wheat fields. Milo. Corn. Rice. Immense expanses of flatland tilled for grain crops or cotton, the staples of the Bible Belt.
If a tire rolled over a nail out here, if a radiator hose came loose, if a fan belt did whatever fan belts do, she'd be alone. A pretty woman trapped in a car. Isolated. Victim written all over her. Nobody would hear her screams out in these desolate boonies. Screams? Hell, you wouldn't hear dynamite out here.
And then, standing by itself at the side of the road, a two-story sign! Surreal and mind-bending out in the silvery nothingness:
KEHOE'S PLACE
in immense white letters on a black background. As she drew closer she realized it wasn't at the side of the road but out in a field a quarter of a mile or more away.
My God! What sort of an ego needed their name visible like that? It was an advertisement for someone's screaming need: Hey, look at me, folks. I'm successful! Admire me!
It got worse the closer one came and she could make out dots that the poor visibility had obscured, dots between the letters. P L A C E was an acronym and further on down the road one could see the massive archway over a private drive, doubtless inspired by Giant, Tara, and a lot of bad episodic TV. Kehoe's P.L.A.C.E.—Petroleum, Land, And Cattle Enterprises.
Wow, she thought, almost skidding as she braked, startled by a pickup truck that roared out of nowhere as if it were going to charge out onto the highway, but braked just in time. She had a glimpse of three laughing faces in the truck cab.
The weekly Bayou City newspaper lay on the seat beside her: “VIRGO (Aug. 23—Sept. 22),” her horoscope read. “Invigorating travel helps unravel mystery."
44
New Madrid Levee
Less than twenty-five minutes by car, but an experiential universe away from Sharon Kamen and her travail, the beast was back.
He too, however, was on a trail. Anyone else wounded and recovering from a car wreck would have foregone the hunt, but Chaingang's needs were beyond the ordinary. They'd taken him down a gravel road and set him back in dark weeds. Two hours of still, fiercely resolute surveillance had finally been rewarded. He'd seen movement inside the small, tar-papered house.
Still itching, tired, filthy, hunting might have been low on his immediate priorities but for one thing: Vengeance was inseparable from the healing process. Of all the cruelties and inequities of life, the two things that would send Bunkowski instantly bugfuck were child molestation or animal cruelty. The shrinks had lots of names for his identification with animals, but, explanations and psychobabble aside, remembered pleasure was everything for the beast, whether it was raw sex or raw meat. Nothing was as delicious as raw revenge.
When the punk had whipped his horse cruelly in front of a hungry Chaingang, he'd added Jerry Rice's name to the stained Boorum & Pea
se accounts receivable ledger that the human exterminator had carried since his days in Southeast Asia. The bulk of the entries fit the homemade title Utility Escapes, but in the back pages were names, accounts, clippings, addresses, reminders of judges, CEOs, dog bunchers, baby rapers, freaks, punks, molestors, and torturers, the worst of the monkeys, the ones who needed to be found and erased with extreme prejudice. Richard Shmelman, CEO of the soap monolith Myers and Gumble; Judge Robert Watkins, who punished the good mother and sent daughter back to the arms of her torturer; Edmund Furst, president of ACME, the notorious American Cosmetics Manufacturers Executive; the woman who sold her kids into slavery; the man who condoned his kids’ “harmless” slaughter of a petting zoo, and the judge who backed him; the humane folks who do product testing on animals; the Taiwanese merchants; the Bangkok kiddie pimps. A random page or two of yellowed newspaper clippings contained more offhand animal cruelty than a Mexican rodeo, more stories of child abuse than a major city's DFS file cabinet. Mr. Bunkowski's shit list. Names he could recite like a rosary.
Inside the tar-papered shack a bright explosion of light suddenly spilled out of an open door into the yard. Loud voices carried. Two men left on a bike, in a roar of unmuffled, gravel-spitting acceleration, and when all was still again he moved from the shadows. The horses were saddled and tethered where they still stood, presumably, from that afternoon. Starving. Unwatered. Shaking.
He waited for a long time, conscious of the sound the twelve gauge would make and how the noise would carry. Then, when he knew the time was right, he blasted the piece of shit through a window, paying back the drunken asshole who closed his eye, the Snake Man, the girls who'd laughed at him that time as they sailed by in their daddy's convertible, the people who made hospital gowns, Spanish Rodriguez, Mommy, Dr. Norman, the designers of cars who made them for fucking dwarves, the seven goddam dwarves themselves and the cunt who dropped them, Norwegian whalers, Japanese sailors, Illinois jailers, the whole shit parade, the double-zero buck punching a nice wet hole in the middle of all that trash.