Butcher (34 page)

Sheriff Pritchett said, “From what we can tell, Mr. Meara was carrying a pistol with him and had parked near the clinic. Eyewitnesses say he walked up to Doc Royal and shot at him, point blank. Fortunately he's a lousy shot and the bullet barely grazed Doc on the side of the face. He lost a lot of blood but they got him patched up real good. Meara didn't attempt to resist arrest."

No motive has been established for the shooting, but Meara was believed to have been distressed over the Clearwater Trench Spillway project, which involves an area surrounding his farm.

The accused man was reportedly given a severe beating by inmates in the Clearwater County Jail when it was learned that he had shot Dr. Royal. A nurse, Earline Chambers, said that Meara was probably suffering from pneumonia at the time the beating occurred, and was probably ill when the shooting was committed.

Later that evening, when Ray woke up to receive medication, he had weird, remarkably clear memories of a conversation between Sharon and himself. He couldn't be sure if it was real or imagined.

“Don't be so violent in your reactions, Ray,” he could have sworn she'd said, trying to teach him. “You're not a stupid man so why react so narrowly to things? It only limits your perspectives and trashes your values in the process.” He knew he could never have made up such an elegantly turned phrase. “Life is worthless without decent values. Forget the macho rhetoric a second. Think! We live in a world of constant fighting: Muslim against Jew, Catholic against Protestant, Christian versus Christian, and so on. If we don't learn to live together we're going to kill off the human race, you know?"

“I don't agree,” he'd said, in a bullheaded mood. “Sometimes hard-core payback is the only answer. Look at your Israelis, you call them nonviolent? And I say good for them."

“Forget the vengeful stuff, Ray. The only steps that have advanced mankind in the last century were those taken by nonviolent leaders such as Gandhi and the civil rights leaders. No exceptions. The ancient moral values are the only ones that make sense: nonviolence, strong personal ethics, truth, and keeping to one's principles."

He'd sure learned that lesson well. Still, sick and hurting as he was, he realized how much he'd learned from Sharon in a short time. She'd already managed to sensitize him to deeply felt, subtle things he'd never bothered to consider before.

Meara closed his eyes and tried to visualize her there in the small cell with him: five feet, six inches of lovely woman. Dark-hued, velvety smooth skin, pale gem-green eyes, and the most provocative mouth of any woman he'd ever known.

The back page of the local newspaper stared up at him when he opened his eyes. He forced himself to pick up the paper and scan the horoscopes. There it was:

“SCORPIO (Oct. 24-Nov. 22) This is an ideal time to redecorate your surroundings. Emphasis is on authority figures. But resist the temptation to run away."

S
haron is walking across his front lawn. Not in high heels but sandals. Bare, tanned legs, long and sleekly muscled and inviting, walking with the insinuating hip-swinging stride that is the patented walk of sexy young women the world over. Still sophisticated looking but in a thin, flowered summer dress, and sandals. Pretty as a picture.

Her arms are bare and she has rather slender arms, and this, too, is very sexy. He remembers other girls, some of whom had large breasts and relatively small arms. Inside his head he sees the medal of a proficient marksman and the line “expert in small arms."

Sharon's hair is long, loose, a spill of sensuousness, a cascade of silky femininity that flows onto her shoulder. He might ask her to let her hair grow and to wear it hanging to her waist, like his grandmother had, and he would help her give it a hundred strokes every night.

He feels his hands on her shoulders as he comes up behind her. Sees her turn and smile into his face, her eyes wide and the color of perfect emeralds. Eyes of desire.

Did he ever know a girl like her, a mere child of the farm community, perhaps, struggling to pull her child's grass sack through the rows of cotton? Did such a beauty learn beside him, as the smaller boys and girls were taught the rigors of front and back chopping and blocking the plants? Not here.

He had never known a Sharon. Never fumbled with one in the back seat of a car. Never walked one home from school. He had no memories of anyone remotely like her, a mystical, perfect, idealized dream girl who had blown in—and out—of his life.

There was scarcely enough of Sharon inside his head to construct a decent mental picture. The best he could do was a kind of half dream, part reality and part imagination, woven from the crude threads of a jailhouse fantasy.

The Swift Trench

A
faint chill mist has descended over the party of men, tiny droplets of moisture touching skin, hair, fabric, plastics, beading on the oiled metal surfaces, feeding foliage, dropping into the floodwater beneath the boats. Skinheads, most of them.

Two boats. The one in front a sleek fiber-glass V, and the man in the prow signals. A chopping motion with the hand. The one seated behind him turns and blinks his flashlight once, a long, bright flash at the larger boat behind them. Five men. Equipment.

Both engines stop in a dying purr. Jesus SanDiego, in the prow of the V, absorbs the noises into the pores of his skin. Offended by their pathetic performance. What a joke, these loud, incompetent assholes are. He shrugs it off. No problem. He hears fifty sounds in the unquiet silence.

They are floating in the mouth of the Swift Trench, a black and oily pipeline full of goosenecks and elbow joints that curves up from New Madrid past the Clearwater Trench, forking out toward Barne's Ridge and St. James's Bayou. They're maybe a couple of miles from their destination if they were going in on a straight shot. They're not. They are snaking in from the southwest, out of the cover of a long, thick treeline that runs from the set-back levee clean to the trench itself.

The boats have come upstream from Clearwater, staying west of the levees, running as silently as they could. No lights. One long blink for stop. Noise for go. The V is packed and muffled down. The thirty-footer has a relatively quiet 120-horse on her.

Sandy sniffs the wet night air, wormy and rank, listening to a truck or car rattling across the Kielheimer Bridge, moving up over the levee. He turns, nods, and the kid behind him throttles forward, and the low, throaty 120 rumbles like the glass-packs in his uncle's antique Fairlane, as it coughs into the black wake of churning water they leave behind.

It goes back to way before Farmington, this thing that made Sandy bad. The drugs that burnt him out were what the doctors blamed everything on, but truth be told they only heightened what was already there, twisted and dark, inside a man whose only secret wish had been a hard, unswervingly pernicious death dream. When a man can kill and get away with it—hell, be praised for it—well, then, chief, why not do it? It feels so good and you know what they say ... nobody stops. The people he works for treasure him for what he is.

The man in the prow of the V feels the chill spit hit him lightly in the face like a wet kiss, and his mind wanders back into a fantasy about guns.

Sandy loves guns. Somewhere under all this water old shooter Ray has got him a case or two of Alpha Kilos: sweet, neat, wiped, and piped. Custom suppressors. Assault rifles that have been combat proven in every conceivable terrain. Bitchin’ fine cap-crackers that SanDiego can almost taste, hot and sweet like physical desire. Free for the taking. Ray sure can't use them.

Old Ray will have them beautifully turned, fitted to a fine hello, packed like the Hope diamond, and hidden someplace real dumb. Mad Man Meara, a thousand times crazier than SanDiego, so fucking stupid in an age when even the most inexperienced gunrunner knows you use Ma Bell's landlines, only Ray still makes home deliveries! Begs to be taken off. Aches to be ripped.

Jesus is powerfully built, black silk bandanna over skinhead top and whitewalls, rat down the back, black and silver-flecked muscle shirt, red rag armband with his animal count, bat-belt, chute pants, 14E felony flyers, loyalties tattooed on his biceps, emotions on his knuckles. Thickly muscled arms cradling a Ray Meara speciall, as he prays for a night game.

They reach the willows and he fast-forwards his fantasy to the moment where he asks Ray where the guns are hidden. Meara starts to wise off and he sees himself jamming steel in the asshole's mouth, like a big, hard dick. Meara tastes 3-in-1 oil and his own blood. Sandy busts out a few of his teeth with the gun barrel. Lets him eye the death tube.

Perfect night. Almost no moon, and this is the last night they will work in here. The honcho found what he wanted, but they will go in this final time.

The guys with him are wussies. He smiles, wishing he could unleash a burst and watch three or four guys dive like fucking blue marlin. It breaks him up thinking about them diving overboard into eight or nine feet of muddy water. Four cartoon belly-floppers. Wussy assholes.

He chops and the kid stops, blinks, the pontoon boat throttles down and the two boats ease through the trees. On the other side of the willows the water is like four football fields of black glass stretched two by two, end to end. Perfectly still. No wind. The mist is diminishing. Somebody else drives over the Kielheimer. The muffled engines will carry a mile or two out here. He waits for the vehicle to pass.

Water sounds. Fucking frogs. “Do it,” he says, and the kid scoots them out across the glass, through Meara's northwest ground and into the woods. The 120 rumbles, penetrates the edge of woods, he motions for both boats to kill their engines. Behind him the big pontoon boat rides treacherously low in the black water.

Bayou City

D
aniel Edward Flowers Bunkowski had chosen the night to go calling, but the object of his interest, the inappropriately named Jesus, was, sadly, not at home.

Undismayed, the beast penetrated his lair carefully, the cheap lock quickly defeated by a Taylor lock-pick-gun and a few experimental tries. Chaingang's lock-smithing and invasion skills were remarkable, in spite of his first mentors’ having been failed exponents of the crafts of picking, peeling, breaking, entering, and thievery.

It was as filthy looking a crib as one could imagine. Much as he'd have enjoyed a hands-on experience, it was too nasty a hovel even for Chaingang to wait around in, and he had once lived in a sewer.

Down in the depths of his ruck he found a small rattail file. He removed a little package wrapped in huge T-shirts, shorts, and thick, 15EEEEE socks. Raymond's Nitrolite. He took the package from its nest, got a roll of duct tape, which he kept in a wrapping of aluminum foil, and slowly, meticulously, began the preparation of a homecoming surprise.

By the time he'd finished with the most demanding work, his appetite had returned. Without thinking he idly opened the noisy refrigerator to see if there might be some unopened or otherwise consumable food. Dead cockroach corpses lay stiff in funky pools of turquoise mildew, illuminated by the refrigerator light. Chaingang wasn't quite that hungry, so he unzipped and urinated into the appliance.

That accomplished, he sighed, farted, flicked the awful dew from his pink lily (what he liked to refer to as his rostenkowski), and tucked it away in Porky's and Skunkie's voluminous boxer-jockeys. He yawned, belched, farted again, scratched his enormous ass, adjusted his package, and gently set about screwing the light bulbs back into their ceiling sockets. He replaced Mr. SanDiego's cheap light fixture and the threaded retainer that held it in place, spat, tried to fart again but drew a blank, hoisted his ruck and left the disgusting crib.

He waddled back to the car, heaved his tonnage in, and drove a block and a half away, where he killed the engine, sprawled back across the front seat, and waited. He wanted to be near enough to watch the fireworks when Jesus returned, blundered into his cave, and hit the living room light switch.

He'd taken the three bulbs out of their sockets and made a tiny aperture in each, just so, using the small file. A glass cutter would have worked better, but he was able to make do with the rattail. Utilizing a fragment of stiff paper for a funnel, he ever-so-delicately filled each of the penetrated bulbs with Nitrolite, which was an explosive substance roughly ten times more powerful than C7H5N3O6, and maybe a hundred times that of black gunpowder.

The handling of Nitrolite is not for amateurs. The stuff has a well-deserved reputation for instability, and he did not know how long it had gestated in four-mil wraps under Meara's rundown barn. But if necessity is the mother of all invention then field expediency is its wayward daughter. He managed to get the Nitrolite in the bulbs without
a
, blowing himself up real good, or,
b
, breaching the ultra-fragile filament wires, which were the found-object detonators for these particular boomers.

Unfortunately Daniel had fallen fast asleep and did not get to watch Mr. SanDiego come home for the last time. He was not able to get his jollies in those seconds of anticipation before Jesus entered his domicile and went to his ultimate reward. His chainsaw snores were interrupted by a concussive force roughly that of—well, imagine being at ground zero in an arc-light B52 strike. Even a block and a half away it hammered the soles of his feet, his bladder, his lungs, his teeth. He tasted it like a mouth full of garlic. It deafened him.

He'd used way too much Nitrolite,
way
too much. It blew up Jesus, the house Jesus's crib was in, Jesus! It blew up the tree in the front yard and about eighteen hundred dollars’ worth of glass, and imbedded a joist in the wall of the beauty salon across the street ("We cut great head"), causing the lady who lived next door to frighten the hell out of her partially deaf husband sleeping beside her when she screamed at him, “Wake up, Vern, they just blew the levee! We've got to gather up the cats!"

Oh, well, Chaingang thought, swallowing to get his hearing back, starting the car, shit happens.