Savant

another second.

'Yes,' she said, as the hot jism shot onto her fingers. 'Now you can learn what's what, you fuck. Now you can find out what it's like to have real balls.' And she started slowly pulling the smooth balls out of his butt, and he screamed with pleasure as he ejaculated. It felt as if he must have shot the load of loads, the king shit orgasm of the century, as the gut-tearing ultimate climax went ripping through him. He'd never known such total abandon and almost unbearable pleasure.

Her coarse tone cut into him as he lay jackknifed across her bed, nude, spent, almost unconscious in a kind of post-paroxysm of complete docility. If she'd told him to go back in and clean the rest of the house with her toothbrush he'd gladly have obeyed. He thought he was falling deeply in love with Cindy Hildebrande. He couldn't wait to buy her a fucking diamond or something outrageous.

'Come on. Let's go. I gotta get moving. Okay?' Her tone was the same as when he'd reached for her in the car. A man's command voice. A tough soldier's voice. A fucking D.I.'s voice. He didn't understand. Hadn't she liked it, too?'

'Cindy, wasn't it good—you know—for you, too?' he asked her, genuinely perplexed at her sudden shift in attitude.

'Yeah. Sensational. Now I got to hit the bricks, doll. Come on. Get your clothes on. Let's go.' Rushing him into his clothing, for crissakes. He pulled on slacks, the sweater, got his shoes back on. She was hustling him out the door almost as if she were bringing in the next shift. What was her trip?

'Man, you had me goin',' she said, conversationally, as she handed him his wallet, pager, keys, and pocket change. 'I saw that pager—and I knew you weren't any fucking doctor. I thought maybe you were Vice.' She laughed. He had no idea what she was talking about. She physically pushed him out the door. 'I got my five hundred. I took it out of your wallet when I checked for I.D.,' she said in a nonchalant tone. Just letting him know she'd been paid. His heart sank like a chunk of concrete.

She was a fucking hooker. He was a goddamned john to her. He laughed, by reflex, so that if any people were watching him they wouldn't know he was so upset. She'd conned him. Played with him. He snuffed back the tears at first, but then he let them come, streaming down his face as he got into the car, banging the wheel with his fist. He started the car up, but changed his mind, shifted into park, with the brake set. Got out and unlocked the trunk and took his baby out and put her together right there in the street. Fuck it. Snot running from his nose. Snuffling like a little kid. He blew his nose into the street and slid a big pointed APEX (X) into her. Lock and fucking load. Walked back across the street, spitting, blowing, clearing his throat. Trying to hold the tears back for later.

As always she saved him, pulled him out of the shit. The second he held her, professionalism took over, and the finest sniper alive became one with the unique killer in his arms.

'Cheekpiece, stock, shoulder rest, detent, oiler, adjustment port, spanner port, windage, elevation, parallax, receiver, recoil pad, base plate, grips, trigger housing group, action, image enhancement control, safety, forward guard, bolt, bolt knob, bipod, anchors, objective adjustment, heat shield, Ultronics silencer and flash hider, sling connectors, forward grip, barrel adjustment, barrel—' His right leg kicked out and the door smashed open.

'Wait a goddamn minute—hold it!' He could hear her voice screaming from the bathroom. Water running in the shower. She came out with a towel in front of her and saw Shooter Price's killing face over the top of his baby's business end. That was the last Cindy Hildebrande would see or know. 'What?' was forming on her lips when he squeezed one off. Inside the small hallway, it sounded like a telephone-pole guy wire tapped with a metal rod.

Pwiiing! A metallic thwock that wasn't as loud as the sound that parts of Cindy made splattering off the hallway walls. He was covered in stuff, and so was his darlin'.

Nasty! He'd never done anybody up close with the weapon. He'd had no damned idea in the world it would take them apart like that. It was one thing to see the results at a mile away or whatever. But the power of her up close was fucking awesome.

He found a couple of rags and got her wiped off, and then cleaned himself up as best he could, wrapped the rags in another rag and carried his weapon and rag bundle out to the car. There was nobody watching him—that he saw, anyway—and he loaded her into the trunk, put the rags in a box to be thrown away, got in, and started the car.

It was amazing how much better he felt. He flipped the toggle on the OMEGASTAR and saw that Big Petey was nice and quiet. He switched the pager over to OMNI DF, put it back on primary monitor, and drove down the street.

He was almost back to the motel, feeling good again, keeping time to the radio with his fingers on the wheel, a golden-oldies station playing 'Hard for the Money,' when the movement alarm sounded on the DeMon.

He killed the audio and pulled over, checking the OMNI. The primary target was in motion. He felt like working. Why not? He pulled back out and headed north.

The big boy was moving fast. He unfolded a Kansas City map. What the hell was out this way, he wondered, besides the county line? Well, one thing for sure, he couldn't go too far or he'd be in the fucking Missouri River.

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15

Chaingang loved to cruise the strange, darkening burbs of the heartland in the hours following sunset, watching sensors kick the arc lights on, feeling his own vital signs quicken with the coming of the night. He thought of it as sightseeing and he could drive aimlessly through suburban tract developments as one chauffered one's family to see the Christmas lights on a snowy December's eve.

It was invariably fascinating to him, an excursion to slowly negotiate the clean, traffic-free streets, musing about the monkeys who lived inside their overpriced, boxy ranch homes with two-car garages, red-bricked Colonials, and fake Tudors with swing sets and swimming pools in the back yard.

Of an evening the twinkling amber lights would glow from their windows like yellow cats' eyes, portals to mysterious worlds of taxpaying, workaday dads whose preoccupations were with the trivialities of sitcoms and tended lawns. Aliens, they seemed to him, with their absurd play morals and ridiculously structured lives of regimented and duplicitous familial love. Who were these monkeys? Where did they come from—they were everywhere now, snapping pictures, chattering; brainless simians who lived behind five-hundred- dollar door in impeccably decorated Sears showrooms.

They pulled him, you see, with their quiet residential streets and tended shrubbery. He felt the magnet of vulnerable humanity drawing him. How easily he could penetrate their portals, slice through the cozy pseudo-safety of their bolted, locked doors. The weight of his massive killing chain became a serious presence as he thought about how he might enter their lives and turn their worlds into sudden hellish shitstorms of pain….

He flows with the traffic on Sterling, past Norledge, Gill, Chicago, veering northeast now around Mound Grove Cemetery in the direction of Mill Creek Park and a point beyond. Sees the neatly stacked series of firewood logs—a half-dozen racks of wood, perhaps—which appear to have been lined with a plumb bob. Perfectly symmetrical lives play out their days and nights inside. Next door, the house is dark. Maybe up close you'd hear the sonorous sound of ever-present television from within. A 'security door' stretches his face into the wide, beaming dimpled radiance that is his most dangerous smile. Pass, his instinct warns him, and he forgets these houses. But then at the next block, midway, he is inexplicably pulled by the hearts that beat inside a home that glows with lights.

Something about this dwelling screams at him. Victim! it shrieks, on a level he cannot pinpoint. If only time permitted. He has so many to do, so little time to do them in. It is impossible to be bored in such a rich and alien world: the phantom empire of Lemuria or Muritania; west of the pillars of Herakles; south of Middle Earth; a thousand million fathoms below the surface of sunken Atlantis; in the subworld towers of topaz; Daniel glides through serpent-infested, monster-haunted seas in search of monkeyfish.

He is nearing the place where they live now and his concentration kicks into third gear. He passes a huge truck stop, and the names on the fronts of the eighteen-wheeler giants type on his mental processor: Freightliner, International Transtar, GMC, Peterbilt. He sees the street sign. Parks. Gets things from his duffel and melts into the shadows.