bargains that were swept away by the onrushing tide of urban renewal and 1950s change.
Now the CHEAP!! USED FURNITURE!! signs hang from the fading blue walls of empty storefronts in the ghostly predawn as this monster of a man, squeezed behind the wheel of a stolen Mercury Cougar, drives through the place called Bluetown. He has a sore, throbbing ankle and his gall bladder is acting up again. He weighs close to five hundred pounds and he has taken three human lives in the last forty-eight hours. The steering wheel is digging into his gut as he drives gripping the wheel in those steel fingers, thinking about how he could easily find out where Janice Siegel lives. It is nothing personal with him, just a way of passing the time. But sometimes he will allow himself to take a fantasy daydream over the line and his head will feel funny and in the bloodroar he will do bad things.
A sixth sense tells him to control himself and concentrate and he jams a powerful index finger into the tape player's stop/eject switch spitting the cassette out. He kills the audio. He listens intently, hearing the Cougar's tires sing on the wet pavement, and the sixth sense nudges him again. Quickly, with surprisingly fast movements for such an enormous hulk, he reacts to the nudge and wheels the car into a dark parking lot next to a store, braking, killing the engine and lights, scrunching down out of sight on the passenger side, driving down the street one moment, now hiding in the shadows the next, operating on those unerring vibes.
He waits. Listening to the motor cool. Listening for what? A passing prowl car perhaps. He waits there in the dark shadows of a Bluetown parking lot. He waits for a long time listening and absorbing. Waiting. He shifts his weight and with a groan of springs sits up again and starts the car, pulling back out into the streets of Bluetown.
Out on his spooky, one-man night patrols in The Nam he would concentrate fiercely on preparation. He, the one they called CHAINGANG, was never caught unprepared. He believed in the Soviet dictum 'plan hard, fight easy.' Except that he planned hard and fought hard and by God if he fought you at all, this mountain of kill fury, you were going to have to—as the saying went—gut up and buckle for your dust. When he focused on a target with his special brand of laser-keen concentration and meticulous preparation, he was a remarkable adversary.
Each time he went out beyond the perimeter, whatever that might be, sprawling firebase or ragtag NDP, he itemized everything in his enormous ruck mentally. He carried a backbreaking storehouse neither you nor I could budge, in which would be packed an orderly array of every life-sustaining necessity from det cord to his precious freeze-dried 'long rats,' the goodies that let him have the slack to run free, untethered to Resupply and the idiots and amateurs who knew nothing of killing. And each time out he would painstakingly itemize each item. Not one to make mistakes, back then.
Now, calming himself, becoming more controlled as he winds through the ghost of some long-lost businessman's folly with the funky and meaningless name Bluetown, squeezed behind the wheel of a hot Merc Cougar, he begins acting more in character. Itemizing automatically, he remembers the plates that he took last night in the suburbs when he dumped the woman's tiresome Datsun. He decides which pair he will change to as he smiles over the kill last night, his thoroughly enjoyable suffocation of the salesman whose vehicle he now drives.
Wrenching his mind back to the current problem at hand, he brakes, pulling the Cougar over to the curb beside an abandoned gypsy storefront with the peeling legend USED RNITURE, and reconsidering, coasts into a narrow alley between the stores. With great effort he propels his bulk out from behind the wheel, and getting out of the car with a massive creaking of springs, he takes a small oil can and tool bag from his duffel and heads to the rear of the Merc.
He selects the most appropriate of the plates (he has memorized the current plate prefix and number code for all fifty states), gives the oil can a few squirts, and with bolts soaking briefly contemplates his current options. He then begins to unscrew the woman's rusted license plate bolts from out of the plates, and he substitutes a fresh tag.
Completing that task, he then bends the plates into an unrecognizable metal accordion and locks them back in the trunk to be pitched into the next creek he crosses. He will repaint the vehicle tomorrow if circumstances permit, and the words MASKING TAPE, and NEWSPAPERS, are mentally added to a subconscious list of want items he has filed away, his shopping list. He slams his humongous body behind the wheel again and takes off, leaving the desolate streets as he found them, dead and blue.
Out on the highway again he drives carefully, but with the rapid flow of dawn highway traffic, keeping it as close to sixty as the rest of the rapidly speeding cars and trucks will permit, trying to stay within a string of vehicles as much as he can without going to extremes of speed. At this hour a car moving at the legal fifty-five would probably be as conspicuous as one doing ninety, so he lets his heavy foot press the accelerator a little closer to the floor.
Driving on one level, planning on another, lucid, coolly introspective, he methodically dissects, probes, examines—all with a cold objectivity unusual in even the extreme precognates. Rocking down the highway, crammed into his borrowed wheels, listening to the endless hum of the white line, the hypnotic white that never ends, humming between the wheels as he excogitates.
He knows, just as he always knew in Vietnam, in prisons of one kind or another, exactly the degree of danger to which he's exposed himself. Analyzing his recent carelessness and general ineptitude, he intuitively can feel himself being pulled down into a viscid pit of jeopardy that is taking him under like quicksand.
Three hours and ten minutes later he's whipping the Mercury down off a blacktopped levee access and beside an old, railless wooden bridge over an apparently deep drainage ditch, crashing through the chained gate that sports a rusty, CLOSED—DO NOT ENTER warning sign, and slamming to a stop in a cloud of sandy dust. Large, prominently placed admonitions nailed to ancient oaks and cottonwoods advise NO TRESPASSING, as they oxidize in the moist, cool shadows.
He limps back to the demolished gate, covering his tracks with a leafy tree limb, and with hard-eyed concentration does his best to right the gate again, restoring it to some semblance of its original state of disrepair. The broken chain and padlock lie in the nearby grass and he hefts the chain, liking the weight of it, thinking how easily he could put a human to sleep with it, but he repositions the chain back on the broken gate, the lock still attached and dangling from one end.
He fastens the whole thing to the gate with a couple of lengths of rusting fence wire and returns to the car. Years of experience have taken over and he moves now as he did on night jungle stalks, giving himself to animal instinct, each decision viscerally made, choices assessed and arrived at instinctively, deeply controlled, as he operates on some alien wavelength, responding to vibes, following the silent drum of the hunter and hunted.
The Mercury bounces along the overgrown pathway that now is beginning to buffet the underside of the chassis with hard stubble that feels as tough as corn stalks. He perseveres, roaring on undaunted through he tall, wet weeds, being forced to slow finally as the pathway becomes more and more difficult to follow as it winds its way down around the levee and heads toward the nearby river.
Now running parallel to the riverbank the path such as it was all but disappears, and the stolen car is splashing through even taller wet weeds, and then actually running in water, almost to the floorboards in the lower spots; and still he keeps going. He is driving through very deep water now, driving as he always does by following a secret magnetic pole, some inner compass, going with the flow, barely moving as water sloshes back over the chrome grillwork and threatens to drown out the motor.
Yet Daniel Bunkowski keeps on straight ahead, keeps pushing it, keeps moving, driving without apprehension, quite calm in fact, oblivious to the rising water. And then, sure enough, the vehicle is back on higher ground and the windshield-high weeds part as he drives up beside a trio of dilapidated summer cottages that sit waterlogged alongside the riverbank in an overgrown fringe of tall watergrass.
He senses that he is alone here, and his ability to detect the presence of other human life is quite uncanny, having kept him alive in Southeast Asia time and time again. He stops the vehicle and quickly prepares a crude camouflage of weeds and the huge, folded cammie-cover he carries in his ever-present duffel bag. He is deciding how he will set his people traps, and at this he has no equal. He is the absolute master of the final surprise.
He imagines, reasons, PRECOGNATES how they will come as he looks down the trail toward the winding levee road and the wooden bridge. He makes the estimates in his computerlike mind. How long he has before they find him. Not long. How many will come. Many. How they will make their play. Several clear options. He is in harmony with his physical being, and at one with the terrain as he meticulously rigs the traps that begin alongside the camouflaged Mercury Cougar.
One of the elements that makes Bunkowski such an inordinately dangerous killer species is his automatic
