In the ledger there were also names, addresses, newspaper clippings, and tiny entries razored from various directories, books, and magazines. There were trial write-ups. (Judges were a favorite entry.) The district judge who fined the man a dollar for the death of several animals, quoting scripture as his higher authority, his name and address were recorded for payback—should an opportunity present itself.
The judge, defendant, and defense attorney in the recent matter of a tortured child whom his honor had returned to the care of the torturer were entered for retaliation. There was the stable owner who'd been caught whipping a horse to death for the third time, and the CEO of a large oil company. These were the names that Chaingang had memorized, sometimes complete with images, which he would scan in a kind of litany; familiar bedtime stories he liked to fantasize about. Men and women whom he hoped to take to the edge of whimpering, screaming madness before he let them die. In a way they were his prayers.
Bunkowski, possessor of a phenomenal eidetic memory unit, had no need for the ratty, soiled ledger which he continued to carry with him. But it pleased him. He would thumb past the dog-eared, yellowing pages, and the cutaway view of a wooden trap he'd once built in a catch-basin of the Chicago sewer system would fill him with nostalgia. Or the complex notes for a particularly insidious variation of a Malaysian whip would crinkle his face in a beaming smile as he remembered the pleasure of the first enemy he impaled on it. It was his Linus blanket.
He could open randomly to a small map that he'd once made driving through marshland and recall the pleasant hours spent at an old waterfront hideout, or see a place where he'd picnicked over the site of a mass grave of his own making, or recall with undisguised glee the planting of the shaped charges that once wiped out a squad of the little people. These were wonderfully pleasant memories. It was his family photo album. His vacation slides. His home movies.
Chaingang sometimes would hold the ledger without opening it, not thinking of any particular entry, but just enjoying the knowledge that it represented countless kills, scores of escapes, dozens of times when he'd faced the monkey men and come away the victor. It was a survival manual. It reassured him.
Dr. Norman had been puzzled by six missing ledger pages. He knew the subject of his intense study so well, and Daniel was not one to allow blotched drawings, flawed map-making, or those sorts of accidents in something of such importance to him. Why had the pages been removed?
Daniel himself feigned ignorance of the matter, having claimed that from time to time when he'd been under extremes of duress the pages had been used to build fires, write messages on, and once—he admitted—when there was no toilet tissue available. Dr. Norman believed otherwise.
There was information on those pages—secret plans, perhaps—that Bunkowski did not want anyone else to see. That is what Dr. Norman thought. He was wrong.
The missing pages had been particular favorites of Chaingang's; pages that had warmed him time and again with hot recollections of steamy violence. Memory triggers and fantasy levers. Pages that in some way brought back the boiling pleasures of various crimes. The pages had been torn out in the heat of the moment and ingested.
They were gone, quite simply, because he had eaten them.
The ramshackle building that houses the biker club faces Fifteenth, squatting ominously between two slum tenement houses. A plethora of large street machines, Harleys for the most part, have crowded the small yard frontage spilling out into the street.
Midnight moonlight drenches the pavement. Probes for movement. Finds none. Blackens, bleeding into phantom silhouettes and pools of deep shadow. Quiet, untroubled, totally in harmony with the darkness and mood of menace, Death observes from the pocket of deepest impenetrableness. He has all the watcher's strengths: presentience, patience, concentration, and unswerving relentless hatred. His natural abilities number analytical acumen, logic by inference, observational reasoning skills, and other assorted gifts. His is an acquisitive/inquisitive mind. He wants to know.
How many? Who? Where? What are his options, parameters, hazards, vulnerabilities, escape routes? The one who thinks of himself as Death is master of the conclusionary processes: induction, eduction, reduction, deduction. The techniques are commonplace enough, but the processes—these are rare.
He has lowered his respiratory rate, not unlike the manner in which people can control their heartbeat rate by exercise. Death stills his vital signs by a kind of self-hypnosis, massive will, and the traditions that have become this killer's disciplines.
The single street light illuminates the clubhouse headquarters, its salient aspects being a street number above a filthy metal door and a painted sign reading SVS/M K.C. Chapter, near which two bikers loudly argue.
Death cares nothing of the names they choose: Steel Vengeance Scenic Motorbiking; Satan's Vipers and Sado/Madmen; Silent—Vicious, Slaves/Masters; in his street conversations he's heard three names. In his head, they are the "dog and cat punks." Some of them wear their count proudly, in scraps of colored animal rags, or in cryptic notations on their skull-and-dagger colors. They are childish thugs and he will now eat their lunch and be done with them.
Death keeps his own mental count. Thirteen are present. Eleven inside the club and two in front. Seventeen names wait in the mind. One—temporarily gone—beyond even his reach for the moment. Imprisoned. Three are absent, and he will take them, too, very soon.
He waits. Something is ajar. His vibes are all he trusts, especially in such activities as these. Some loose end has taunted him since the killing field in Waterton, Missouri, where he constantly prickled from an eye in the sky, an invisible watcher somewhere beyond his scope. He found locator devices hidden in his clothing and custom-made 15EEEEE boots, and from that time he'd been able to shrug off the feeling. It had returned, inexplicably, an itching that had settled on the thick roll of muscle and fat at the back of his head. He forced his concentration past it and stepped out of the shadows.
"I'm gonna get me one of them damn things if—" one of the punks was saying when a steel chain link approximately the width of a coffee cup in diameter smashed his thoughts into jellied pulp.
As the other punk started to involuntarily react, his world was turned upside down.
It is an alien sensation for most two-hundred-pound men to find themselves suddenly dangling in the air, but that was only the half of it: something foul-smelling and awful and approximately a foot wide had picked him up by his face and shut off his breathing. This monstrous thing was connected to a mutant roughly as powerful as three or four of your average Kansas City Chiefs defensive linemen and it was pulling him down, holding him immobilized, suffocating him while he kicked and flailed about ineffectually.
He was not a man used to being terrified. The emotion was, in fact, new to him altogether. But an immense beast squeezing his face, mashing his lips and nose and eyes all into a grotesque parody of the adult who holds the child's cheeks tightly so the lips squeeze together, had taken away his air supply, his mobility, and his reason. The hand, with a grip so powerful it was tearing his flesh, crushing the bones in his face as it suffocated him, then suddenly released him and he sucked air in desperately.