thieves, thugs, fakers, freeloaders, fugitives, felons, freebooters, footpads, fag-bashers, and fruit-rollers of every type, size, shape, creed, kind, and color of the rainbow's dirtiest oil slick.
He is—therefore—multilingual and fluent in street guinea, gypsy, carny, cowboy, bum, drifter, grifter, and the assorted dialects of homeboy, gangster, and juju man. He reads hobo chalk-talk easily, and watches—with no small degree of amusement—the crossbar variations advertising free medical aid, handouts of clothing, food, and the quid pro quo expected of the recipient in the way of work, con, or fast moves.
He puts no store in such childishness, but it pleases him to watch for the intersecting circles, stick-figure- and-triangle art, and the slashes that speak only to the brethren of the boxcar and the denizens of the drunk tank about such monkey dangers as hobo-haters and men with guns nearby.
His doughy baby face is distorted by a beaming, dimpled ear-to-ear grin when he sees the ticktacktoe scratches on the side of the foundation cornerstone nearest the front door, that is, nearest to where the door would have been before the fire.
But only if you speak hobo do you realize it is five lines and not four. It is a serious, adult signal, not a child's game. It reads, to the initiated:
EXTREME DANGER! A CRIME WAS COMMITTED AROUND HERE, AND THIS IS A BAD PLACE FOR STRANGERS.
Night takes its time, this day, but it does eventually come and erupts layers of liquid black lava over Tinytown, slough, dump site, and reservoir. Light is gone from this remote and moonless spot, and the fortresslike factory brick is gone, the ramparts of the old water treatment plant, the tree-line silhouettes and false horizons, and the look of country, town, warehouse, walkway, railing, and water all blend into darkness.
Death waits here in ticking readiness, tremor-sensitive, vital signs stilled to a near-motionless flutter-crawl, in absolute menacing silence, waiting and hating, precognating and gestating, alembic poisons refining, transmuting, distilling the venomous loathing into its most lethal essense. The beast lets it build, boil, bubble over into the red-hot tidal thing that will sweep over humanity in a murderous mutilating frenzy of destruction.
This hatred, which has a life of its own, has changed, mutated, and—hypertrophied and swollen like a tumorous membrane—it will sicken him if he does not expunge it. It wells up inside him now.
He knows that he has been extrinsically controlled by this, even partially manipulated into position by suits who play his fierce, deep loathing like a finely tuned instrument of mayhem, and this only worsens the hating, amplifies his hunger, deepens the thing that lives on the hate essence, forcing him to kill. Death is troubled by the unseen hands that set him in place. And he uses this, too.
Arising from his temporary den near the reservoir, concealing his burrow with twigs and boughs, he inhales deeply, light-headed by the musk of bloodlust, awash in his own sewer fumes, faintly nauseated by the sudden purity of pine, spruce, and the sweet scents of fern and earth.
The man is in the small cottage, and dogs bark inside, fueling the beast's madness. His mental computer takes over now:
VIRGIL WATLOW, he screens.
LEFT PROFILE. Grainy shot of an unshaven man. Late twenties. Close-cropped black hair. Unimportant history. Irrelevant statistics.
DOSSIER: He hits DOG BUNCHER, skips the details. His anger is already beyond the manageable stage.
He is at the door, having deposited duffel nearby. No weapons. No chain. This is hands-on work, and if he has the bowie, he will waste this BUNCHER. And that would be wrong.
“Yeah?'
“Mr. Watlow,” he says, in a mincing sissy voice, “I'm Kenny Harman, from the clinic?” Kenny hep you?
“Eh?'
“I'm buying dogs for the clinic.” He foists a huge pawful of documentation at the man, who dumbly stares at the papers. “We were told you'll sell direct. We'll take all you have.” The papers have the local clinic's imprimatur, along with trash from drug companies that he's rescued from local trash bins. “What do you charge per dog.'
“Aw ... that depends ... uh...” Barking is a constant accompaniment to their dialogue.
“Would you mind terribly if I came in? I think we should keep our transaction private, don't you?” Chaingang as a simpering homosexual is something that must be witnessed to be believed. He has the actor's naturalness.
“Yeah. Aw’ right.” Virgil Watlow moves back into the living room of the home which stinks of urine and feces and animal smells. A woman, surprisingly, comes out of the next room, looking at Chaingang as if he were a float in a parade. Mouth agape.
“Could I see what you have?'
“Get the dogs,” the man says, and his significant other sulks off, returning with the weight of a file drawer.
“Uunn.” She drops the drawer.
Chaingang sees movement in the drawer under a wire screen. Noise. Hears the man say something.
“—only got four right now. I'll have some more next week and—'
There is a blur of movement. Daniel Edward Flowers Bunkowski's hand-to-eye coordination is extraordinary. He would have quick hands if he were an NFL wide receiver. But on a human blimp they are always a surprise.
He bops the woman on the head with a hammer-fist, a bottom-fist blow that sounds like a bolt gun taking a cow down in the abattoir, and she snaps that dirty whore-hole of a mouth shut when he pops her head, dying even as she goes down for the count, and the elbow is across and striking, focused beyond the back of Virgil Watlow's head, smashing between his eyes just to stun—not to kill.
Bop. Pop. That fast. Both down.
He secures Mr. Watlow and begins work on the drawer. Gets the screen off. Tries not to look into the stinking thing. Dumps the four live ones and the dead one onto the filthy kitchen floor. Proceeds to open every can, jar, dish, and container in the Watlow refrigerator and kitchen shelves. The small dogs feed. There is more barking out in back of the house, he now realizes, and he will tend to the others later.
He opens drawers and finds a kitchen knife of just the right sharpness. It must be just sharp enough, but he does not want a scalpel edge—this needs to be painful and just a tad blunt. The cuts must require a certain degree of pressure.
He has pedicured Mr. Watlow and is beginning the manicure when the man comes around for the second time. But he passes out on the first cut, so Chaingang gets smelling salts from his duffel, and returns. Revives him yet again. Saws at the next knucklebone and—bang! Mr. Watlow passes away.
Sad at this tragic and untimely loss, the beast cleans up and frees the dogs, preparing to leave. There were twenty-one digits that required attention, and—unfortunately—he only got to twelve of them. Tenderly he opens the woman's mouth and inserts the parts from Mr. Watlow's extremities, placing the tips of the toes and fingers in, so that the mouth will remain agape. He wants to leave her just as he found her. More or less.
He realizes some of the dogs may not be able to fend for themselves, and that it may indeed be cruel to turn them loose. He fights the impulse to stuff a couple down in his shirt for pets. Perhaps they will survive—the hardier ones. He observes, not for the first time, that life is cruel.
25
Seth Pisckovik did not seem to be particularly whelmed by Mary's and Royce's inquiry, much less overwhelmed. The second or junior member of the firm of Pisckovik and Pisckovik, pronounced Puh-SHO-vick, was neither better nor worse than the average small-town attorney-at-law. His reputation varied to both ends of the spectrum, depending on whom one asked.
A brusque, middle-aged man with dark, poorly complected skin and a widow's peak, he greeted them the moment they arrived for Mary's appointment, showed them to seats in his office, and spent nearly five minutes with
