Chaingang (30 page)

The Genneret outfit was forgotten the instant he saw the watcher and identified him. The farm and the cruel men would have provided him with a smorgasbord of wildly delicious opportunities. Another time—perhaps.

When he saw the movement in deep shadow, he froze again. The huge links of the yard-long, friction-taped killing chain dangled at arm's length.

Now he knew what the sound of the human voice he'd heard represented; it was a watcher whispering into some kind of microphone. A headset thing, maybe, with a transparent tube-type mouthpiece and connected earplug.

“Negative,” he heard the shadowman whisper, “Blue Leader, I do not have a visual.” Chaingang moved forward as the man spoke into his tiny plastic mike, the powerful right arm in motion as he moved, the massive tractor-strength chain moving through the air, propelled by a wrist and forearm and upper bicep of steel, a blur of snaking chain whirling into the deep shadow and connecting.

The chain made more noise crashing into the bushes than the man did falling. Only a hard splat, an
off
of air, a relatively quiet clump of dead weight—two hundred pounds plus machine gun—falling in a crumpled heap, marked the kill. It was a far more merciful extermination than Bunkowski would have been preferred, but this was no auction house security guard. This was one of them—the invisible eyes. If they were this close, and in the numbers that they would have to be, logic dictated that he expedite his plan's final stages.

He checked the fallen man for life signs. Quickly searched for ID and found neither vital signs nor identification. The weapon was ID enough. That and the commo gear. He was very still again, listening, his sensors scanning for the presence of a partner.

Satisfied after several moments, he eased his great bulk down to the ground beside the man, carefully inserting the earpiece, which he'd found near the watcher's bloodied head. The umbilical cord that connected the headset to the guts of the radio apparatus was too short to facilitate much slack, but with his head beside the inert man's, he was able to insert the earplug.

There was nothing. He waited. As the seconds ticked by, he wondered if they had decided to move in and take him. Were they though with him now? Had he fulfilled his function? Was this experiment or operation now to be aborted with extreme prejudice?

“Blue Leader to Blue Tracker Five—do you read, over?” He grinned into the dark silence, stifling a coughing explosion of mirth. He could utter words now, and the watchers would hear him. What of it?

“Blue Leader, this is Blue Tracker, did Five confirm a visual on Side Show?” The other voice was less clear, but he could hear it.

“Uh—Negative, Blue Tracker, stand by one. Blue Tracker Five, do you copy this transmission? Over."

Chaingang removed the small earpiece and took the high-impact microphone between his thumb and index finger and squeezed. Crunch!

He silently backtracked his way through the pipeline to his vehicle, fighting to keep a damper on his rage, but boiling with irritation at having his plans for Mr. Genneret so rudely interrupted.

Chaingang was gone. Inside the office of the show and auction company, mean Dean Seabaugh, Sally Peebles, and Doyle Genneret shuffled papers and talked of a workaday things, oblivious to their luck. They should have run to their wheels, driven to the nearest airport, and chartered the first thing that would fly them to Vegas.

Lady luck was smiling on them this night. They'd come this close to riding the Genneret Exotic Animal, Livestock, Gun Show and Auction on the midnight red-eye straight to hell.

There are those to whom solitary confinement, isolation, and the horrors of restricted movement would be a nightmare. Others, perhaps, might find solace in the heart of private darkness. If it is all you have know, your escape can be a kind of exquisite pleasure—even the severe challenge of the biter.

He is wonderfully alone now, and the night is chill, but he relishes the feel of it on his enormous body and stands—nude and gigantic—the cold breeze somehow pleasant as it cools his skin. He thinks about monkeys. The lights in the distance twinkle and beckon, as his mindscreen scans poisons and toxic drugs in preparation for John Wayne Vodrey, the amputator of children's pets.

What care he will manifest in his application of extended pain to Mr. Vodrey. Curare, Pavulon, Succinycholine, and Venticol all cross his field of thought. Paralysis, respiratory malfunction, pain enhancement, each widen the travesty of a smile that distorts his doughy face.

Who is this strange, poor, genius, idiot, clown, killer, animal lover, people hater? Is he Lucifer, Gilles de Rais, Iago, or Frankenstein's monster? Whoever he is—he can hate. God on high, how can he hate! To him you are less than a microscopic mote, less than the smallest, slimiest elongate, less than a whiff of puke-stick, less than frog-spit on stagnant water, less than the sum of your parts which he will cheerfully render into blobs, clots, gouts, of bloody clabber and gure-deck. So imagine, if you will, how much he feel about Mr. Vodrey?

No evil will suffice. No screaming, splatter-drenched revenge will begin to palliate, abate, or atone. He cannot show Jones Wayne Vodrey the blunt chain-kiss of his great disdain or the Poe-fear of premature burial (paralyzed by rare poison and made insane by drug-enhanced awareness of pain) and the awful anticipation of the unknown. But he will come up with something.

Having identified the problem, his unique mind will collate and assess the product stored, produce a working hypothesis, test and reassess, forming in the anomaly that is his cerebral cortex a procedure and course of action.

Even now as he examines data retrieval, something tingles on his skin. Perhaps it is only the cool of the November night on his vast nakedness. As always, he does not ignore the pinpricks that have touched him.

He shivers as a leisurely lizardly slithery leathery feathery thing causes him to shudder in the darkness, while he watches the Tinytown lights across the flat field.

From the road one can see nothing, but from behind the ruins of the sharecropper shack—from the empty field—one would see the bright stab of light in the mouth of the thing, and know that a hot fire burned in the belly of the beast. It scared his innards with the unexpected intensity of the sensation that something, a factor out of his grasp and beyond his field of vision, was wrong.

Travel down Whitetail Road far enough in a meandering northwesterly direction, circling around the pond and through the surrounding cotton fields to the northwest, and you come to 771, a county blacktop that runs back toward the river. Right before you hit Market Road there's a little job to the right, nothing more than a gravel run, and it will take you through a pit stop known locally as Finch Hollow.

There's a café and general store that doubles as the post office drawer for the thirty or so inhabitants of the tiny farm community, a gas station, a feed-and-seed operation, and an out-of-the-way pay phone located over by an MFA oil sign.

The same phone had been used the day before by a “Mr. Norman of General Discount Stores, calling from Scottsville, Kentucky.” He had reserved a room at the Tennessee Motor Courts of Maysburg, for their sales manager, “Mr. Conway.” They thought he would be checking in within the next couple of days. They'd call and cancel if he was going to be late. “He'll bill it to his Visa or MasterCard,” the sissified voice of Mr. Norman proclaims to the motel clerk. The line rang.

“Tennessee Motor Courts, Good Evening."

“Good Evening. This is Mr. Conway. I believe my company made a reservation for me—General Discount in Scottsville, Kentucky?” The rumbling basso profundo resonated in the motel clerk's ears.

“One moment, sir. Yes. We have your reservation."

“Well, I'm sorry. I'm not going to be able to get there for a couple of days. I'd like to change my reservation accordingly. May I do so?"

“You certainly may. Any how long will you be staying with us?"

“Just one evening, the way it looks now. Say, listen, I've got a package that I've had forwarded to me there at your motel. And I'm afraid it's going to get there before I will. Is that going to cause a problem?"

“No, I don't think so. I'll make sure the other clerks on duty know that a package will be coming for you, and we'll just hold it at the front desk for you. Okay?"

“I appreciate that. Thanks. That'll be a big help."

“The package is coming addressed to you here?"

“Yes. It's from a clothing store out East, East Coast Big and Tall. And I also have a fellow sending over some petty cash, which I would like the front desk to hold for me—the reason I'm doing that, the package is being delivered by taxi cab, and I want the clerk to pay the driver out of my cash envelope. Can that be arranged?"

“Well...” The clerk was suddenly on his guard. They'd never had to do anything like this before, and he wasn't sure. “I'd have to ask my manager."

“Listen—that's fine—but there's no problem. It's very simple. You'll be getting an envelope in tomorrow's mail, and I'll check back by phone to make sure the cash is on hand. It has fifty dollars inside—in cash. I doubt if the cab driver will charge more than twenty dollars, and I want to give him a least twenty dollars for a tip...” the deep voice rumbled on, confusing the clerk with a stream of details. The clerk had to break away twice to answer calls and deal with the desk traffic.

During the telephone call the name Conway and General Discount Stores became identifiable in the clerk's mind. When they finally saw the envelope with the return address “Mr. W. Conway, Scottsville, Kentucky,” with the big red GDS logo, it would all be an official paid-for transaction. Nothing solves problems like crisp new ten-dollar bills and corporate name. The motel would “sell” the transaction, in turn, to a taxi driver who would be asked to pick up ad deliver a package that had arrived in care of general deliver.

The cab driver would already have his cash in hand. If he was asked to leave a package atop a certain pay telephone kiosk or booth, he might think it weird, but he would be likely to comply. Mr. Conway was going to be born again—born out of the box—and no one would see the delivery.

Mr. Conway, who would materialize at some far-flung location, might or might not remember to cancel his reservation at the Tennessee Motor Courts of Maysburg. And the busy clerks would never think it a bit odd that the envelope containing fifty dollars cash had been postmarked “Finch Hollow, Missouri."

Nor would they know that the corporate envelope was one of several that had been retrieved from the bottom of a company dumpster.

WHITETAIL

S
omebody was always uttering succinct aphorisms that stayed in the back of the mind and cooked. When you needed a profound thought, and you reached back in too far, you'd grab one of those all-purpose maxims instead. “Vigilance is the price of liberty.” Who said that?

The price of vigilance—that was something else. That price was up there in the stratosphere. It could cost you. The price of one's thrills could get up there, also. You do pay for your big chills—no question about it. There was another adage to live by.

Royce sipped at his wine, but it had gone bad. It was bitter. Nothing tastes so strong as raw truth, taken straight.

“World Ecosphere, Inc., presents ECOWORLD,” he read from the glossy brochure, “with a commitment to research for a better tomorrow.” Awkward. For a megabuck outfit, the copy sure was stilted, almost as if it had been translated into English from Cantonese or Taiwanese or Korean. That's what it was. Their hype read like the instructions on an imported battery-operated toy.

“Cleaning the air we breathe, greening the land we inhabit, and gleaning the sea's harvest” were among the parent company's prime concern. “Development of fossil fuels, solar power, and other low-cost energy sources for home and industry...” The thing had the feel of one of the old documentaries they used to show in school during civics and social studies class.

“The public will be a part of ECOWORLD, participating in a vast and innovative recycling complex based on new scientific principles that could literally change the world's face!” This read like VCR instructions translated from Japanese.

He took his pen and wrote the word “Japanese,” followed by a question mark. Then wrote another paragraph and stopped, reading the whole thing back to himself. What if they made copies of an “investigative report to the people of southeast Missouri” and circulated it everywhere? Not just media and law enforcement, but had it printed as a leaflet and dropped over the town.

“Hey,” he said to Mary, who was in bed, thinking. “You asleep?"

“Uh-uh."

“What if we ... uh...” His voice faded away.

“I'm awake. I'm listening. Go ahead."

“What if we had leaflets made. Who's the guy that drops those—the pilot?"

“Huh? Oh! The guy in Cape."

“Yeah.” He tuned out on whatever he was going to ask her, and resumed reading his notes. She was miles away, a few feet from him, with an old sheet clothespinned to a rope across the width of the cabin, for propriety, she supposed. She was in the bed but with her eyes wide open. Royce was at the trestle table. He reread the notes.

“The supposed ‘Community Communications Company’ that is building Ecoworld is not what it appears. The company exists only on paper, a front for something called World Ecosphere, Inc., a mysterious, well-funded corporation operating in Washington, D.C. and New York as a holding company. But the company—again—is more than it appears to be, just as Ecoworld is not what they claim it is.
We have hard evidence that indicates Ecoworld may be a sophisticated cover operation for the largest clandestine drug laboratory ever built in North America!"

He read the details of their find—the itemized list of toxic and hazardous chemicals found on the property subsequent to the construction of the first concrete structures—a list that read like a recipe for cooking
killer ice
, the street name for the most deadly strain of freebase cocaine ever manufactured. How it might be possible for the people behind Ecoworld to distribute worldwide from their drug lab, under the noses—no pun intended—of the townfolk of Waterton. The amusement park aspect, with displays, tour participation, even circus-type rides tied to ecological themes, would work both as a physical cover and a money-laundering conduit. Even the foul stench of cooking narcotics down in the concrete bastion covering the central excavation might be explained by the research-and-development theme. They could be experimenting with toxic waste eradication, or pollution control—any number of plausible possibilities to choose from. It was the beginning of a perfect drug operation that could prove to be all but impenetrable.