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.
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
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
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
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 & Pease 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
