Butcher (33 page)

The man in the suit and tie beamed insincerely at the camera. He had very white teeth and a manicured mustache.

“Porkchop weighs over nine hundred pounds—” he paused for dramatic effect while the audience let out an audible gasp, “and Porkchop is what he
likes
to be called, right?"

“Yeah. That's my name. Porkchop.” The viewers at home and those watching the studio monitors saw a hugely obese figure sprawled out face down on a stack of mattresses. Only his head and bare arms could be seen. His body was covered in two blankets which had been sewn together. The man's head appeared to be disproportionately small in comparison to the enormous mound under the blankets.

“Believe it or not, folks,” the host of the show continued, “Porkchop is married to a beautiful woman. Dasheeka, are you there?"

“Here I am,” a woman said. She was an attractive woman, and as the shot widened out the audience could see her seated on the mattresses next to the huge man.

“Porkchop, you and Dasheeka have given us permission to inquire publicly about a very personal matter. We want to ask you about your intimate relationship together.” He lowered his voice to a soft, pseudo-concerned-sounding caricature of sensitivity. “How can you two have sex?” The audience held its breath in unison.

“It's easy,” the man on the mattresses said. “You just gotta work it out, you know? Me and Dasheeka are a perfect fit. She's hung like a donut and I'm hung like a donut hole.” The audience whooped and hollered as laughter filled millions of living rooms.

“We'll be right back,” the talk-show host said, pretending to be shocked at the man's remark.

“Do you have an opinion about today's program?” an announcer's voice asked, as a nine hundred number was scrolled across the television screens. “Call us at 1-900-SPEAK UP. Each call costs fifty cents, and you must be eighteen or older. Let's hear your opinion."

Daniel flipped the audio off with a remote control. He got up heavily from the sofa where he'd been watching television, wedge between the man and woman of the house. “You two behave yourselves.” He clomped across the carpet, his 15EEEEE feet making nasty squishing sounds as he walked to the telephone and dialed.

He listened for the instructions and gave the telephone number. When he heard the tone he made his recorded message.

“Hello. My name is Bill Stephens,” he said, giving the name of the man who was watching silently from the sofa, “and my wife and I just saw the show with Porkchop and Dasheeka. It just
killed
us. It was so funny,” the deep basso profundo rumbled, without a hint of mirth, “we died laughing.” He hung up, and walked back through the pools of coagulating blood.

When his bare feet were nice and wet he walked over to the dining-room table, and with some effort hoisted his butt up onto it. Carefully positioning himself he then made one footprint after another on the wall, lying on his back as he walked up the wallpaper as high as he could.

Mr. and Mrs. William Stephens, of Turdtown. Missouri, eyes taped open and heads duct-taped to the sofa itself, observed their human centerpiece—unseeing—as he left bloody tracks, then sat up with a grunt and began wiping his feet with the wet towels he'd arranged nearby. With that accomplished, he hopped off the table and walked across scattered pieces of clean cardboard to the bathroom.

Tomorrow, the next day, someone would find the three corpses. Whoever or whatever had ripped their hearts out had then apparently walked across the room, up the wall, and dematerialized.

The talk show had put him in a playful mood.

B
y the next day it was business as usual at the doctor's office. The waters were pushing in closer and it seemed there had been a rash of terrible explosions. So far, eleven persons were dead. By coincidence, most of them were members of a local white-supremacy outfit.

Dr. Royal could have canceled his appointments easily. He was semi-retired, and no one would have thought a thing of it. The idea tempted him mightily but it was no time to get lazy. The last thing he wanted was to commit any act that might fit a profile the authorities would surely have by now designed to match up with the actions of their elusive Nazi, as they'd have clumsily put the facts together.

He was full of pain-killer, but still much the worse for his encounter with the Jew bitch. It was all he could do to keep his avuncular smile in place while JoNelle Lanahan ran her ugly mouth about her problems, reassured her about the diet he'd prescribed for her enlarged thyroid, and got the heart attack survivor out of his office. He'd seen one more old patient, Bess Cosgrove, whose crippling arthritis was worsening. He prescribed a special pillow, changed her medicine, and gave her the obligatory pain shot, which would wear off almost immediately. Somehow he made it through the midday. He told his nurse, “I'll probably be back around one, but don't schedule many. I want to quit early today."

“Sure. Two-thirty all right?"

“Fine,” he said, glancing at his watch. It wasn't even eleven yet. He'd nap for an hour. Eat a bowl of soup. He went out his private office exit, closing the door, checking to make sure it had locked, and turned to see a familiar face waiting there in the parking lot of the clinic.

If Ray Meara hadn't been tired and ill to begin with, he'd have taken a clearer look at the bedside clock and seen that it was not shortly before eleven but more like two minutes before nine, and that his clock had stopped at eleven the night before. Had he started the day armed with this small piece of knowledge he might not have hurried, and he probably wouldn't have ended up stepping off the submerged guardrail of the Mark Road Bridge.

But Meara did hurry, and he did step from a boat directly into a deep ditch filled with ice-cold river water, and he was still in shock, not to mention injured (though unbeknownst to him at the time), when he found the frightening note and book left for him at the motel office. Within minutes he knew that Sharon had never returned from her foolhardy confrontation, that the cops were not about to lock Dr. Royal up for murder, and that Royal and Shtolz were one.

Meara, still on his feet but barely operating, simply refused to grasp the fact that such a note as he held in his hand, together with the missing-persons list that now included Sharon, were insufficient evidence to cause the constabulary to immediately arrest the town's leading citizen as a mass murderer.

He fought back the urge to scream in Jimmie Randall's face. He knew the reaction that would cause. The cops were “concerned,” and Doc would be brought in for “intensive questioning,” but it was “too early” to be sure Sharon Kamen had disappeared, and the words began to form a bullshit cloud, hanging oppressively in the air that Meara was finding more difficult to breathe by the minute. He finally dialed a local lawyer named Stephen Ellis, whom he'd heard was gutsy and aggressive.

In a breathless avalanche of words he sketched it out for Ellis. “I wanna do something. I got to stop this guy. What about a citizen's arrest? Isn't there such a thing?"

“Sure. You can arrest somebody. You arrest Doc Royal, let's say. He gets a lawyer and countersues you for false arrest. Now the jury awards him your farm. That's the way that could work."

“But he might be getting set to disappear himself. What if he gets away with this shit? I gotta do something. I know he's done something to Sharon and—” He was beside himself. “I gotta
stop
him!"

“Okay. I'll be down there as soon as I can. Stay at the motel and wait for me. We'll go to the courthouse and—” on and on. Papers. Warrants. A U.S. marshal would blah blah. The sheriff would do such. He would make bail. You would do this, he would do that. Meara thanked the man and hung up, went outside, and tried to breathe as the bullshit cloud filled the room behind him.

Double pneumonia, both lungs, overpoweringly potent even in its incipiency, ravaged Meara's system, which was already unbalanced by the trauma of the boating accident. Later, he'd learn that as he stepped off the bridge rail, left foot first, the weight of the boat had brought some three to four hundred pounds of steel rushing up to clip him on the spine, then again at the base of the skull, as the tippy boat fought to right itself. The plunge into frigid water had shocked him so totally that he never identified or remembered the two fast blows as he went over the side.

The massive shock of realization that the town's leading citizen, a kindly man he'd known for years, had a monstrous alter ego—this, and Sharon's situation—combined with his physical deterioration to pull him further down.

Once again, a quirk of timing played a part. Had Meara begun his day in a normal fashion, and showed up at Jimmie Randall's office only a short while later, things might have proceeded in a far different way. Twenty-one minutes after Meara left the city administration building to return to Sharon's motel, praying she'd suddenly appear or call, a truck driver found Sharon and called the police, the Bayou City ambulance service, and the Clearwater County sheriff's office. But Ray's timing was bad.

It was a brain-addled, desperate, and violently angry Raymond Meara, both physically and mentally impaired, who stumbled from his pickup in front of the Royal Clinic at 10:43 A.M. He figured it was after noon, and his plan was to wait for the man to return from lunch and arrest him for the murders.

His brain signals were malfunctioning and all he could think of was revenge. Royal must not be permitted to escape. He reached in and unholstered the pistol in the glove compartment, holding it down under the dash as he racked a round into the chamber and thumbed the safety off. Cocked and locked.

He turned, shock, grief, pain, trauma, double pneumonia taking him under, as the man he was after appeared at the side of the building, saying something to him and laughing, and very slowly, as if in a drugged state, every move on slo-mo, he laboriously pulled the weapon from his belt and said to his old friend, saintly Doc Royal, “You're under arrest you son of a bitch,” pointing his firearm at him as he'd been trained to do, the words sounding inside his head as if they'd been pulled through axle grease and molasses.

“
YOU'RE UNDER ARREST YOU SONNNNNN
NNNNNNNNnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn nnnnnn and on and on, a long, unending nnnnnnNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
of pain that became a
WALL OF SCREAMING NOISE THAT WAS BOTH QUIET PISTOL SHOT AND WOMAN'S TERROR-STRICKEN SCREAM.

How the finger touched the trigger and why he felt as if he were passing out and what made him squeeze that trigger before he fainted he could never be certain.

Ray retained hazy images of a man and woman there in the parking lot, the woman screaming again and again as if someone had dropped a mouse down her dress, and somebody else looking at him from the passenger side of a parked car.

He looked down at old Doc, either dead or very close to dying, with a CCI Stinger having just gone in through the face, exploding the brain on its way out, or so it appeared, Raymond shivering, not fainting after all, finding the strength to go back and put the gun on the floorboard beside a small, leather-bound book that he'd knocked off the seat.

He sat in the truck waiting to hear the siren, wondering who would show up first, Jimmie Randall or Eddie Roddenberg or some other asshole, coughing, looking at the weapon and the book, the word Lebensborn mocking him with its golden eagle and swastika.

Clearwater County Jail

M
eara was a man deep in confusion. Hurt held him pinned. On the physical level he ached from a beating, but he'd had a few beatings before. At least one rib was broken, but he'd broken his share of ribs. The confusion—that was new: a muddy, inconscient thing that pushed at the limits of his sanity, washing across him in dirty waves of disorientation.

The man next to him whispered in a strange, hoarse voice, “—and you know, man, it ain't bad, but you're putting in all these hours and that's when you get hurt ‘n’ shit, when you don't
concentrate
. “Concentrate, the man whispered, and Meara, whose wrists, ankles, and waist were joined by jailhouse iron, tried to concentrate. The hurt stabbed his chest when he inhaled, held his chest like a vise, throbbed across the side of his head. His tongue found another point of soreness.

“So this big sumbitch comes back where we wuz playin’ poker ‘n’ he goes, kin I put my stuff over here? And this one ole boy, he says shit no, you cain't dump on nat, it's
my
bunk, shitbird. And hell, man, you know how it iz inna Navy, it's root hog or
grunt!"
The man laughed in his strange, whispery rasp.

The sign to Meara's left read Out Of Bounds.

“So, shit, I stand up ‘n’ say to this big dufus, we got rules here, boy. This dufus goes whatdyamean, man? And I say, hey, dufus, it's root hog or die, motherfucker!"

Behind them an authoritative flat voice barked, “No talking, assholes.” Meara filed it away for future reference.

To the left was out of bounds, and in this place there were no talking assholes permitted. As if to underscore this wisdom, heavy steel slammed behind them. Meara took a deep breath and winced from the sharp pain. A sign in front of him proclaimed Danger. Below that: Stand Clear While Gate Is In Motion.

This was more information than he could digest. The lights were dim. He fell, but there was no sensation when he smacked the hard surface, wrapped in perplexing ignominy and jailhouse iron. By the time he regained consciousness he was a news story. The front page of a sixteen-page newspaper:

BAYOU CITY MAN CHARGED IN SHOOTING

by Isabel Santora of the
Bootheel-Republic
staff

A Bayou City man has been charged in the attempted murder of retired physician Solomon Royal, 70, of the Royal Clinic of Bayou City.

The man is Raymond Meara, whose address is listed as Star Route, and who is said to live on a farm approximately twelve miles south of Bayou City, in the community of Bayou Ridge. Meara has been charged with attempted homicide.

He is accused of shooting Royal in front of his clinic at West Vine and Petrie streets at about 10:45 A.M. yesterday.