He had the tracker up on the dash and the passenger seat of the Buick was covered in papers: the Kansas City map enlargement, the SAVANT and OMEGASTAR specs, Shooter's dossier and current likeness, all of which had been duly memorized, but remained there for inspiration. The goony- bird face of tightly wound, psychotic Shooter staring at nothing from a street-van surveillance picture, no doubt. Shooter's mouth open, speaking to someone, looking like a jock on his way to the tennis court. Chaingang remembered that Price came up to his bellybutton—the little midget piece of trash. He'd kill him and pinch off his pusshead right there in the fucking street. . . . He found this car intolerable.
Chaingang was parked at a stop sign, waiting in the traffic, experimenting with the seat and the air conditioning. He had it on sixty degrees—cold. Somebody was walking between the cars. If it was one of those bagrags who wash windshields, Chaingang would pull out the .22 and drill the monkey just for practice.
"Paper!" the guy was screaming. Chaingang hit the button that lowered the window, after a few misses, and told the monkey to give him one. Gave him pocket change. Flipped through the wrong section first, then turned it and saw a small front-page headline: Six More Killings, Police Admit Serial Killer. That little fucking shit! Killing on his ground. Who the fuck did he think he was? Someone honked in back of him and he started shifting into reverse to ram them, but then better judgment pulled his sleeve. He had to stay on track and take care of this.
In that moment, he saw through a window in his rage—he was a different person. Celibate! Losing his temper when it could hurt him. He was behaving uncharacteristically. It sobered him and he bit down on his thoughts about the implant, screaming out of the line of parked cars in the direction of Shooter Price, tearing around a beige Oldsmobile and a white Dodge Caravan, driving around a muscle car as if it weren't there, the white blip growing larger and stronger in the center of the OMNI device.
He was locked down now. Concentrating fiercely, with all his energy on the act of destruction, slicing through traffic—five hundred pounds mashed down on the gas pedal, floorboarding it through teenagers and retirees alike, around a kid in a Pontiac Bonneville, a woman in a brown Chrysler LeBaron, a kid in an old Roadrunner, a couple in a Jap thing—zooming out of nowhere to loom larger than life in Price's mirror.
Shooter had been tracking him, he was going to whack Big Petey with his baby, who was in her case in the seat in back of him, and he'd been parked on a side street, but when he saw the blip—the blimp-size blip—coming nearer, he turned the car to follow him and take a shot, but suddenly Chaingang was on his ass, driving a different set of wheels, roaring down on him with a vengeance, and he was scared almost to the point of going sane.
He saw the car come out of nowhere, moving way too fast—he knew cars—they were gonna hit. He floored the accelerator and shot out into traffic and some poor devil in an Ace Trucking Company job smashed into the little M30 with a resounding crunch of chrome, metal, fiberglass, plastic, shit, and shinola. Shooter grabbing SAVANT and shagging ass as the glass— already cracked—shattered under a hail of lead.
Shooter just went—fuck the mobile tracker—and he was running fast— zigging through honking motorists, zagging away from the hail of terminal saturnism—that's your basic Beaumont-Port Arthur lead poisoning—splattering around him. There wasn't but two things Shooter Price could do besides pull a trigger and both of 'em was run, and he flat out ran for his crazy life as Chaingang Bunkowski stood flat-footed, next to a wrecked M30 and an Ace who'd been in the wrong place, glass all around his fat ass, oblivious to the waft of distant sirens, a Chinese copy of a submachine gun cradled in his arms as he cursed his slowness and ran one more magazine through the pipe just for luck.
Bat-batta-bat-bambambam,- popping rounds came across the traffic in the direction of disappearing Shooter, the felt-padded bolt clattering as the weapon blew smoking cartridge cases into the broken glass and car parts.
He had to make himself squeeze back into the car and get in the wind. After all, as his dearest mommy used to say, there was a time and a place for everything.
He made a U-turn, swung around, reached into his duffel and plucked out one of his remaining grenades, and after determining that it didn't have a file- notched spoon (the way his luck was going he'd blow his fat ass up with a short-fused frag!), he took the pin out and tossed it into the M30 convertible, tromped the gas, and watched it blow in the Buick's rearview mirror.
Some days were like that. No matter what you did you just couldn't get arrested.
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21
Victor Trask was supposedly out taping bites for a piece on miscegenation for "Inside America." He was inside his car, taping hallway conversation from a parked car in the eleven-hundred block of Locust, scared all the while he'd be busted and thrown in jail for illegally recording the cops, and getting zip for his chances.
The logistics alone of such a thing were beyond him. He'd not used a voice-activated recorder, so when he couldn't personally monitor he'd had to go back and skim-check hours of random tape, hoping to catch a tiny fish in this enormous sea.
He'd caught nothing but a worse cold, which was now, he thought, settling in as a virulent strain of summer flu. What had he learned? A man—the lieutenant who occupied the bugged office, presumably—had a real hard-on for the Jackson County medical examiner. He was addicted to mixed metaphors. He spent his day on the phone or away from his desk; the long, confidential talks he'd imagined overhearing were nonexistent in this office. What Victor did hear was a bunch of career-related shit about how Sergeant so-and-so should get people to solve their own problems instead of coming to him, and a lot of platitudes about work delegation, keeping options open, prioritizing tasks, and stuff he'd obviously picked up on at a seminar. He kept talking about his "Masters in Advanced Death Investigations," "Project Assignments in Criminalistie Factfinding," and various other subjects that sounded as if they should be in capital letters. He heard nothing about blacks, drugs, serial killings, lab findings, or anything of relevance.
What he finally mined—the lone nugget—came from a headache-inducing monitor of a hallway conversation that he could only halfway hear. It was a maddening thing, like listening to a loud conversation. taking place in an adjacent room where you hear isolated audible phrases but can't make out the overall conversation. A man and woman, not Hilliard, were speaking discursively and a third voice shouted something about a weapon. The word perked up his ears. The chatter moved away from the microphone, and he rewound the tape and listened to it again, not on the tiny earpiece but at full volume on playback, and he was able to discern "…got some more…(INAUDIBLE) how many or anything but it's the same weapon. Estimate the thing has a range of one and three quarter miles and he…" (INAUDIBLE.)
He was too excited to listen further. He turned the engine on, rolled up his windows, and headed back toward the station. He'd gone a couple of blocks—he was very nauseated—and he felt as if his sinuses were so stopped up his head would explode. That was the thought Trask would remember thinking when he saw…someone's…head…explode!
Had he fallen into some terrible time-warp daymare brought out by his worsening flu? The gorge rose in him and he barely got the driver's-side door open in time. There were car horns, trucks honking, and a cab nearly clipped him as he swung to the curb and lurched out onto the sidewalk to be sick again. People were going ape shit. Across the street, they were already converging around a man's headless torso.