Butcher (29 page)

Fate always has her way. Another time and the mad-woman who'd taken possession of Sharon Kamen's body might have waited a few hours, given up, cooled, gone home, calmed down, and things might have ended differently. But fate had settled around Sharon, sealing her destiny.

For two hours she waited. First she'd roll the window down on the passenger side when the windshield fogged up, then it would get wet and cold and she'd run the engine. Then she'd turn it off and the windows would fog up again, and she'd roll the window down. It kept on this way as the rain stopped, started, pounded, slackened off, stopped, started.... It was a long, angry, perhaps even insane, two hours.

Eventually, Dr. Solomon Royal chanced to emerge from his home, and it was a grimly determined woman who sat in chilly silence, the tire iron comfortingly close at hand.

He opened an umbrella and spryly moved down the steps from his front porch, unlocked the door of his car, closed the umbrella, placing it on the floorboard of the back seat, got in, and started the motor. When he drove away she was right behind him, letting her fury press down on the accelerator. He turned, with her on top of him, and when he braked at the stop sign in front of Bayou City Episcopalian, she came up behind and gave him a hard smack in the bumper.

“How's that feel, you Nazi son of a bitching
shit
?” she shouted, inflamed by the rush of adrenaline and power, her beautiful chest heaving. It was consuming her that the man in the car in front of her had murdered her father, and she was about to slam into him again when he pulled out from the four-way stop in a fishtailing squeal of wet rubber, and she floored the gas pedal, coming up on his rear again.

He knew, of course, what the situation was the second he saw the woman's face in the car behind him. It was a stroke of luck that she was stalking him. What lovely timing. Small towns have no secrets, and he'd known about her from the moment she first verbalized her suspicions to the police. Just what one would expect from a family of fucking kikes—like father like daughter.

It was resolving itself so perfectly. The only concern he had now was to make absolutely certain it wasn't some kind of a setup that these bothersome imbeciles had concocted. The odd detective or boyfriend lurking about to witness his reactions.

He wished he could get her to the house, where the options would have been so numerous. First the drugs, chloral hydrate at one end and the most toxic poisons at the other. A coffee cup and drinking glasses that he kept prepared and refreshed in his special kitchen cabinet. There were other nice insurance policies against subjugation by an adversary, such as a relatively benign hypo full of pain-killer or the loose newel post on the stairwell, filled with a lead center, that could swiftly crush a skull.

Then there were the proofs that had overflowed his office and now filled his home with decades of irrefutable history. Dusty photos, awards, framed newspaper stories, magazine covers, full-page pictorials of a young Sol Royal treating GIs. Checkable, impeccable proof that he was who he claimed to be.

He could be infuriatingly calm and logical while she accused him of this and that. Sit in front of the big picture window with a nice cup of tea or coffee, elegant and unruffled in his drawing room. The spider could spin his fine web, talking gently and sympathetically as he poured her cup, his voice a cultured, lilting, hypnotic instrument. She would listen to the rhythmic and measured responses, and perhaps drop her guard at last, acknowledging her awful mistake as she reached for her cup.

He'd continue to placate and convince, his voice soft and well modulated, his demeanor reasonable, his idiomatic grasp facile, with only the slightest accent and hint of gutturalness in his speech.

Bright headlight glare in the rearview was dangerously close and it snapped him out of his brief fantasy. He knew what he had to do and shrugged off the thought of a witness as he headed for the floodwater.

She was right there with him, her lights horrible in the gathering darkness, blinding him. The rain was compounding the hazard. He had no choice.

The instant he got to Andrews Road he slowed automatically and she smacked into him.
Hard
. His head snapped as if it were on the end of a whip.
Twisted Jesus
he would make this Jew cunt pay. Just keep calm.

He hit the water too fast, almost flooding his engine, the Jewess twat inches off his bumper, both of them roaring over the road, smoke steaming from the hoods of the cars as he gunned it up the incline of 1140, watching the line of road, concentrating to stay on pavement, the mirror now tilted straight up to deflect the bright lights.

She tried to crash into him again as he came to the shallow part of the water but he was ready this time, and able to absorb the impact better, and he floored it as he hit dry pavement, shooting forward. He tapped the brake. Nothing. The brakes were wet. He trod on the pedal with all his strength and the car almost rolled, swerving wildly back and forth as the steaming vehicle screamed to a stop on the high part of the road.

He lurched from the car just as she plowed into it, hitting his automobile a vicious carom shot. His “knuckles” were under the dashboard, as was a loaded Luger. He started back around the car to get a weapon but as he saw her backing the other car up for another run at him, he moved away as fast as he was able, keeping the solidity of the engine block and chassis between them.

She backed up too far and one of the tires slid off the soft shoulder. She stupidly floored the gas pedal, in her panic, sinking a radial into several inches of Missouri gumbo. It was all he could do not to laugh with glee. He started back toward the weapons.

But who would have thought she could run so fast? The buxom young Jew bitch was screaming at him, almost on him, “You fucking Nazi killer! What did you do with my
father
?” and he never saw the tire iron. On the word father, a sharp shock of pain exploded down through his shoulder and he fell to the wet pavement.

“Don't! Please! I'm not—” he pleaded.

“You bastard son of a—” She was raising the iron back again when he grabbed a slim ankle, yanking savagely. The woman's arms broke her fall but the tire iron went clattering away.

She tried to kick him between the legs as he struggled to his feet and a pointed, high-heeled shoe caught him solidly on the inside of the left leg, just missing his groin. He screamed and smashed a fist towards her face, which she somehow deflected, scratching his arm as she tried to get at his eyes, and then they had hold of each other, screaming and panting as they rolled across the blacktop and into a muddy ditch.

The woman was fighting for her life but so was he. She'd lost a shoe, and managed to kick the other one off, but in doing so lost her balance and he got away and started up the ditch. She grabbed for his legs, trying to pull him back down, but he was able to kick her in the face and scrambled for the car as she ran up the ditch bank behind him.

Emil Shtolz was covered in mud. There was blood dripping from his left arm. His right shoulder felt as if it might be broken. He was limping. His glasses were broken. He was gasping as if he were about to have a coronary. But he made it to the car before she did and grabbed for the grip of the Luger just as she pulled him backward.

They were back on the pavement. Muddy and bloody and fighting like animals or little children, screaming and kicking and scratching, untrained combatants suddenly learning what it was like to battle tooth and nail. He kicked at her as he racked a shell into the gun, more frightened than he'd ever been in his life, knowing that if he dropped the gun she would kill him.

He fired as she leaped at him and, even as close as they were, he managed to miss. She grabbed for the gun and he shot her in the hand and wrist. She fell back, and he shot her again, but he got her with the next one. Hit her dead center.

He knew several things in that instant: he'd won, he knew that. He knew she was dead. He didn't need to check for vital signs, he'd seen innumerable Jews die, and one more had joined their ranks. He had to resist the temptation to blow her apart inch by inch, because he was going to have to do something with this meddlesome sheenie and her car as well. He knew he had chains in the trunk.

All of this flashed through his head like lightning as he wobbled around and somehow regained his feet. His right hand could scarcely hold the damned Luger, so he took it in his blood-encrusted but uninjured left hand and carefully moved around to where he could administer a coup de grace to her head. As he was starting to bring the front sight up even with her temple under its wet mop of hair, a truck appeared in the distance.

Why should he take the chance of moving her and the car as well? Suddenly it was all too much trouble. No one would be able to prove any connection between himself and the dead girl, no matter how much they cared to speculate. His reputation would protect him—these were his people, after all. He hurried to his car, got in, started the motor, cut the wheel as sharply as his condition permitted, and floored the gas pedal, roaring back in the direction he'd come.

Shtolz’ eyes were riveted on the approaching truck. Would the driver notice her? Would he stop to help, or assume that since no one was behind the wheel of the vehicle that the person had gone for a tow truck? Was it someone who would recognize his car? He sighed deeply when the truck turned as it reached the nearest corner, and devoted his attention to making it back through the deep water and, above all else, not driving off the road.

Once he was on the other side he tested the brakes. This time they held after a few taps. He stopped, backed to the water's edge, and got out, aching but with a strong sense of relief. His problems were almost over. When he was sure no one was observing him he took the Luger by the barrel and, with his good arm, flung the weapon out into the moving stream of water. He got back in the car and headed toward his house. He would give himself a chemical bath, patch himself up, and by the time the authorities came around with questions he'd have an airtight alibi scenario for them.

Sharon Kamen no longer thought of Dr. Royal or avenging her father. She felt herself turning cold, sculpturelike, coming unhinged at the pit of her stomach, abdomen, and chest, coming apart like one of Jean Ipousteguy's reclining bronze nudes. She knew she was fading fast, her arms raised, legs in an unladylike sprawl, too weak to stop the wounds that bled onto the hard surface. She could only think of the woman in
La Femme au Bain
, recumbent, weird, cold, unhinged ... and very still now in the rain.

W
edged under the wheel of a four-year-old family Plymouth, Chaingang observed a spill of treasures in the seat beside him. His duffel and weapons case, a pile of packages bearing the high-concept imprint, “Porky's Big Fashions—elegance for the extra large, tall, and portly.” He made a few quick pit stops: behind a bustling gas station (Goin’ Fishin'? We Got Your Bait Here), where he loaded a hundred and forty pounds of innocent bystander into a dumpster, and at a tire-repair place (We Aim to Please so
Retire
Here!), where he made more than full use of the rest room.

He took a careless sponge bath of sorts using a piece of tarp for a towel and the lukewarm faucet water, then changed into strange long-legged boxer-jockeys that fit in the crotch like a massive diaper for an incontinent sumo wrestler, the largest bib overalls ever made, and a fresh T-shirt. When he left the men's room it looked as if someone had attempted to give his seal a bath in the wash basin.

These needs met, his thoughts turned to his growling gut. He was ravenous for decent munchies. He drove past Esther's Cafe (Home of Famous Bayou Catfish), only because he counted fourteen trucks in the postage-stamp lot and he wasn't sure he had that much ammo. Finally he wheeled into the drive-up lane of a Fastfood.

“Welcome to Fastfood. May we take your order?” the intercom rasped.

“Gimme six Swiss with mushroom, six triple curly-crisps, six mondo munchburgers, six hacienda grandes, six beef ‘n’ bean burritos, and six large conquistadores."

“What would you like to drink?” the box asked, but he was already driving toward the food window, salivating like a bear coming out of hibernation and smelling salmon.

“That'll be sixty-six dollars and sixty cents, sir,” a girl announced through a small crack in the security window, getting a look at the leviathan whose arm, a massive, rock-hard, hairy-pelted thing with a skillet-size paw on the end, was extending payment even as she spoke. She had to force herself to touch the money. An arm roughly the size of a railroad tie rested on the sill, huge fingers drumming impatiently while she filled the security port with numerous sacks of food and his change. “Thank you, and come back,” she said, insincerely, as he stacked the food sacks across the floorboard of the Plymouth, where the corpse of its previous owner had recently rested.

She shuddered as the big thing drove away, a hand shoving mushroom-'n'-Swiss-triple-curly-somethings into its gaping maw. Snaggleteeth meant to wrest meat from bone and bite the caps off beer bottles tore into six sacks of fast food in a salivating, frenzied greaseorama of feasting. Next best thing to a live one.

The watchers meant him no serious, permanent harm. They were not there to destroy him, and that was perhaps one reason why his sensors didn't nudge him. Also, he was feeding, and food was what he lived for.

They'd watched the pulse indicate two stops, but when a couple of minutes went by without any movement they did what they always did, they moved in close enough to eyeball the target through binocs.

“He's
eating!"
the woman said, the word loaded with unusual portent.

“There you go,” the wheelman said, unnecessarily. She already had the door open and was on her way toward a nearby copse. The target was on the other side. Parked.

An observer watching the watchers would have seen, again, an ordinary looking, fairly attractive woman get out of a van and walk into some trees. She was carrying a case that might have held a musical instrument or a fishing pole, and was dressed in a way that would cause no raised eyebrows. She was moving at a trot, but who walks slowly in the rain?