34822 Cypress Road, North Buckhead, by means of prying the front door loose. All power lines to the home had been cut but the alarm system line, which was buried under the home, was not severed and—'
“Too bad they didn't cut that too, we wouldn't have to screw with this.” The alarm system in the Fields home was triggered so that a cut in the line for longer than three minutes signaled the local police. They had complained of many recent inconveniences caused by interruptions in the power by the local utility company.
“Yeah. Anyway, it goes on about the wife and child being out of the house. Mrs. Fields substantiating and corroborating the husband's story. Blah, blah. Two armed subjects ordered Fields to accompany them to the premises of Buckhead Mercantile Bank and Trust, 1705 East Broadway, where he is employed as a manager. Goes on about the surveillance video.” He read ahead silently. “And the fingerprints from the home and the crime scene, and goes on about the vault. Let's see, he described the vehicle as a late-model dark colored Crown Victoria, either dark blue or midnight blue. What the hellsa difference between dark blue and midnight blue. Okay, goes on about the guard. Coleman blah blah, fifty-two years old, blah blah, coroner's report, ballistics, the forensic analysis, spent projectile report, again referencing the surveillance video,” his voice going up and down in a bored little song, “okay, now we get to the nitty.'
“Silent alarm 07:01:30. Dispatched uniformed officers Eleven-Yankee-One. Backup car Eleven-Yankee-Six. Robbery in progress. Okay, here BOI gets the robbery-with-shooting call. Man down. Buckhead homicide rolls on it. We roll on it. SAC, you, me, Delgado. Two uniforms inside when we arrive on the crime scene: Ramirez, Jones. Five clothes: Brown, Lee, Tuny, Peletier, Ecklemeyer. You got the janitor, Jefferson. You got Fields. You got the broad. What's her name? Kelly Pierce.
“Fifteen people besides the two perpetrators who had fled. Now our good friend Mr. Monroe is telling us
“ERROR you got. Somebody didn't count right. Whatever. THEFT BY BANK. Cover embezzlement. That kinda thing. Phillips, or a teller, or the one with the tits. Sees it as an opportunity to cover a mistake. Phillips looks good if you're gonna hypothecate. He could pick up twelve kay and who'd know? He might bet we're not gonna get the perps. So we look at his life a little closer. But from a cursory glance he don't NEED twelve thousand. The janitor picks up some money. When? You got the surveillance tape against that. One of us. We didn't get there soon enough.
“PERPETRATOR you got. John Monroe decides he'll burn his partner and walk away from a Murder One. Shit. Homicide committed during an armed robbery of a bank? He'll burn for it. So he squirrels away twelve grand and calls us with his story. He looks sorta good for that until you spend five minutes with him.” There was laughter in the room.
“So this leaves THEFT BY INVESTIGATING POLICE.” He wrote DIRTY COP on the blackboard, and the chalk scream as if tortured.
They stayed the night in a motel in Rosemont. Chaingang began weaving a tale that was calculated to cover their next move—a move that would surprise her.
“You have all the tools,” he told her in his concept-producer voice, “all the gifts.” A big, dimpled, lopsided smile. “And you're beautiful. But remember where we're going ALL the girls have all the tools and all the gifts and they're all beautiful. I want you to learn the whole thing. I want to give you EVERYTHING so that when we get to California we'll blow the town apart, right?'
“Right.'
“But, Sissy, this won't be easy.'
“Yeah. Well, that's okay.'
“So you are willing to work?'
“Sure.'
“You really want this?'
“Yeah.'
“Well'—the huge head tilted—'what this means is lots of hours of practice, coaching, meditation, thinking, soul-searching, and GUIDANCE. More LESSONS. Understand?” She nodded yes. She had no idea, but whatever. She was game for it. “Here's what I think we need to do. I think we should PREPARE for a few weeks; you'd be on full pay of course the entire time, but spend a few weeks in preparation before we light up the town with your big entrance.'
“What do you mean? I mean, what do you want me to do?'
“This is just a spur-of-the-moment idea, but I know this man who owns some property out in the country not far from here. I was thinking an arrangement might be made where we could stay there and polish your new career until we were ready, and then...” And the words poured out, clouding her mind in a billowing smoke-dream of heady possibilities, and she nods yes. And he is pleased and makes sure she is fed, watered, settled cozily in front of the television set, tucked in, and his game locked down tight. Then he excused himself to “take care of some business.'
His homeliness was not the issue. When he was moving from the black Caprice, his first legal wheels, to the motel room, a pair of punks had pulled out of the parking lot beside them in a red pickup and Chaingang had seen the driver's face laughing at him and then looking over at the passenger beside him as they both roared in derision. But this is not what had distressed Daniel Edward Flowers Bunkowski. Something else, the crooked smile, the set of the upper body behind the wheel, something stabbed at him.
Daniel was a man to whom taunts and ridicule had no effect. He was oblivious to the scorn of the monkees. To a man whose life had been a saga of abuse, torment, torture, anguish, unbearable pain, distress was a catalyst—a hair trigger in a gun loaded with suffering, confusion, misery, bewilderment, and the paralysis of dread and fear. It had kept a child immobile, willing his heart not to beat, willing his tiny penis not to leak or drip, not to pee, willing his bladder not to burst, slowing his respiratory system to death's threshold, taking his mind all the way to its limits and beyond into the darkness of consciousness's edge, willing himself not to scream in his childhood's hellish, unending nightmare rending the mind and heart and soul and rendering the victim a frozen, cowering thing riveted with terror and abject fright.
To this man, whose horror is more jolting than any electric shock, whose fear and hatred is more hallucinogenic than any combination from add to lithium to peyote to paregoric, those hideous, violent, psychodynamic origins and psychogenetic developments cause Daniel Bunkowski to see hear smell feel taste touch and perceive—to say the least—a distorted reality.
And so the set of the punk's shoulders or the bared teeth of the punk's smile is enough to trigger it. And it comes in a hot, brutal tidal wave washing his senses in the mad desire to kill and in just that moment of derisive laughter from a passing pair of punks, in just that hot heartbeat of memory-jarring reality, Daniel's kill lust was kindled. So he said his piece to Sissy Selkirk and was in the black Caprice and the flickering telephone poles whipping by were a hypnotic thing ticking at the edge of his vision as he drove into the darkening night, driving over newly painted yellow line, aimlessly yet with singular purpose, driving toward the heartbeat of an unknown victim.
He would not remember what triggered it, later, or how he knew to sit for so long in the parked car. The infinite patience and mysterious self-confidence always his trademarks. Nor would he remember why he zeroed in on Harmon Schmitz when he saw him. It was a thing of balance. The inner clock. The gyro. The thing that was his automatic pilot and regulator.
Harmon Schmitz was a faggot. A simpering, mincing, limp-wristed, queenish, full-blown, cruising-for-a-lip- bruising sperm-sucking fag. He was as gay as a fucking fruitcake. He had good points. He was smart. He was a
