days in his own rental home. Especially when he went to so much trouble to get the car, interface with the monkeys, play the game, talk the tall. But he would rather be safe than lazy. He can be lazy later, when Mr. Watlow has had a full manicure, pedicure, Chaingang cure. When all those bad teeth have been extracted. He wants to take his time with the
Idly, to occupy his mind as he packs, he unscrews fuses, takes down trip wires; sorts the intelligence his mindscreen provided. Somewhere in all the analyses of meetings with realtors and dead convenience-store clerks, he will see the red flag. An unacceptable risk factor that has come to alert him in the night. Something he missed, that his sensors caught. And perhaps by then he will be long gone from this temporary haven.
In the car. Moving. He gives himself over to the vibes once again. That strange, powerful mind clicks, purrs; assessing, collating, accepting or rejecting what the eyes see and what the brain transmits.
His mindscreen searches for remote haunts where the ambience is just so. This plowed ground is too obviously arable, that chunk of bush insufficient protection in the wintry nights that will come. He registers a rusting metal sign: REELECT BUBBER (something) as he drives past eighty acres of early morning smoke and corn field stubble.
Rusty corn pickers. Hollow catalpa large enough to inhabit. Looming, twisted walnut trees stand by a decrepit tractor shed, against which eight giant tractor tires have slowly disintegrated. All of this flags his concentration. Across the road ten or twelve acres of tulip poplar, maple, and sycamore slowly inch their way up. The word NUSERY registers. He keeps moving. Searching. Hating.
He was in a funk. Parked. Irritated. The vibes were stubborn. His computer wasn't down so much as it was operating on the wrong level at the moment. He felt frustrated by his own warning devices.
Chaingang's equilibrium, a wild thing at best, was maintained by a bizarre system of interlocking defensive mechanisms that were the emotional equivalent of a surge suppressor.
Just as there were those dangerous sights, smells, and tactile sensations that could send him off into a boiling fury, there were sounds that grated on his psyche worse than the vilest curse: a hallway scream, a certain footfall, the cry of an animal in pain, a ripping sound of masking tape, a taut guy wire struck by a hammer just so— any number of noises could push him over the edge.
Banging noise. Loud, harsh voices. Guffaws. Rednecks in the field. The abrasive sounds reached out for him. Something moved beneath his vision arc. He looked down as the grasshopper jumped. The next time it moved, he was over it, and the insect was captured in a hand that was roughly the diameter and density of a bowling ball. The fingers, like steel cigars, held the thing, its hind legs scissoring for traction.
Squoosh! It was much the same with that first cut that exposed the internal human organs. The ritual itself gave pleasure, pleasing him the same way a child is pleased and riveted by the pulling apart of a grasshopper, and the gooey, gross-out look and feel of its exposed ventriculus.
Again the loud hammer strike on steel and the grating human voices. The eyes scan large walnut trees, searching hungrily for nutmeats, walnuts, squirrel sign, dog tracks, deer prints. He retrieves a long-distance killing tool from his duffel. Moves off in the direction of the voices, carefully threading the noise suppressor in place. That is his idea of a pun—this is a noise suppressor that he is about to utilize. A field-expedient noise suppressor.
The monster's computer does not react to the noise that carries, or the snatches of conversation and laughter.
“Nitrate.” The jarring sound of the hammer.
“—got two tanks of beans over at the other place.'
His mind sees two magic Butler grain silos, but the computer ignores this vision. He is memorizing mnemonics and equations for the computation of induction and capacitance. Trying to tap into himself—see the thing that is so jarringly off kilter.
“—it's gone up, too. I just don't know what—'
Capacitance:
“—damn girl run away with him, and we got the boy to look after, so—'
“It's getting too tough out there to cut.'
IFPEC is his induction mnemonic. He cannot think for the noise of the hammering on metal. This monkey man will pay for intruding on his concentration, he thinks, recognizing his petulant mood and not caring.
“You oughta see what (something) got docked for moisture. I mean—'
The bolt moves in between a huge index finger and thumb. One up the pipe.
“I don't like throwin’ em out the back.'
“Never seen anything like this year.'
Safety off. Finger in the trigger housing.
“I put down potash and phosphorus on that ground over by the other place, ya know?'
“Yeah.'
“That fertilizer is up seventy a ton. I was gonna put wheat in behind it.'
“Fuel cost me fourteen hundred dollars more this year,” the man pounding on something behind the combine said, “and two days later I swear if it don't drop nine cents.'
Both in view now. This is what they mean by targets of opportunity. He keeps moving, stepping out where they can see him clearly. The one with the hammer turns.
“Hey,” he snarls, in a cautionary warning tone. Trigger pressure.
BAM.
BAMABAMABAMABAM.
BAM.
BAMBAMABAM.
The hammer of justice. His face is contorted in a maniac's parody of a smile. The hammer is dwarfed by his fist.
Italians have a joke they sometimes tell in restaurants and at the dinner table. Ever eat any
21
Royce Hawthorne had kept his bargain with the phonemen who were supposedly watching over him. It was time to call in the cavalry. He'd done his part. It was their turn now.
Sitting across from his old girlfriend, he felt a lot of different things tugging at him in several directions at once: He knew he was changing. He already felt like a different man from the one who was looking to pack his nostrils a few days ago. There was one upside to being scared shitless all the time—you didn't have time to worry about staying high.
The thing that cocaine does is, it tricks the brain. The great rushes of fear that Royce had been experiencing had acted as a kind of neural blocker to his addiction, and his system was working overtime to rebuild the bridges he'd burned with the seductive white lady. He felt like he wouldn't go that route again, if he could just stay alive.
The skanky, strung-out, self-centered burnout was history. For the first time in a long while he had something better to set his sights on, and the lady was here right now, looking delectable without trying. What he really wanted was to touch her; to stroke Mary's beautiful hair, cup her lovely face in his hands and kiss her, and tell her this bad stuff was all going to go away.
“I got hold of the law again,” she told him.
