Bunkowski no longer needed to open the pages to read the names inside his head:
Belleplaine, Rene (Tiny)
Cholia, Carlos Garcia (Kid Gloves, a.k.a. Cee-Gee)
Harrison, Donald (Donny)
Vale, Ashley Yaples (Bluto)
The third gangbanger, Donny Harrison, was doing hard time in the joint for second-degree murder.
He is aware that each of these punks holds a title in their now-almost-defunct organization: War Lord, Sergeant at Arms, President, Road Captain.
He has researched their real names, records, home and work addresses (a joke for the parole board's files), and all of this data he came by easily, with a few questions to street people, a few bureaucratic phone calls to the proper agencies. One could learn anything over a telephone with nothing more sophisticated than an official, curt tone and the proper-sounding jargon.
Chaingang wanted them all gone. He'd do these, and when the opportunity arose he'd whack the punk inside as well. Put an end to the line.
His mind sorted probabilities, tactics, strategic contingencies. He knew they were hunkered down in a trailer the gang kept north of town, and he was in his wheels, crossing the river, heading over the Intercity Viaduct bridge on the route that became Highway 24, turning left in the busy traffic on Winter Road, driving in the direction of Sugar Creek.
He knows what he would like to do to them, what would be fitting, and he has already taken certain steps toward that end. His computerlike brain probes for weak spots, exfiltration snags, and the myriad details of hazard assessment. He concludes that if something unforeseen happens he can improvise something. He does not see the three biker punks as a serious threat, but while he still regards them as buffoons, scum beneath contempt, Chaingang is conscious of the fact that his immediate goal is to punish.
He would take his time with the targets, and on a conscious level his logic was strong and uncompromising. His subconscious mindscreen, however, was scanning retrieval for something unrelated. Dr. Norman would have been fascinated to watch the beast's mental computer examine stored data:
Reclamation of X-velocity materiel from chemical compounds.
Big-bang mixtures from over-the-counter accessibles.
Improvised M18A1 antipersonnel mine detonation devices.
Construction and field usage of homemade munitions.
Chemistry, math, and the general sciences…
He also saw something with just the
EDGE
OF
HIS
MIND
and tried his best to stop it and look at it but to no avail. It had flashed by too quickly. Something akilter, out of place—jarringly so—an element he had "seen" with his presentience, perhaps, but not identified. A danger to him.
The harder he tried to lock on to it the farther it fled from his grasp, so he relaxed his mind and thought of pleasant scenes. Old killing fields and brutalized sex he'd enjoyed. Tried not to focus on the mindscreen's present to him-sometimes that worked.
Sterling Avenue caught his gaze from a street sign and he turned north into the flow of heavy traffic, driving defensively, but not overly slow—the model of a careful driver if you were behind him. (He was also capable of expert, fast driving. In his lifetime, he'd been stopped by various state cops a total of nineteen times. Once, in legal wheels, he'd taken and paid for a forty-six-dollar speeding violation. Seventeen times, in stolen vehicles, he'd talked the state rod into both tearing up or not starting a ticket, and into killing the "wants/warrants" check! He could have been an amazing confidence man had money interested him. Only once he'd been unable to dissuade the unlucky state highway patrolman with words, and had left him filling his front seat with blood.)
In a more receptive state, he realized that something was still seriously awry with his system. Each time he had this thought it seemed to center in the rolls of fat at the back of his huge tree-trunk of a neck, and shoot up the skull. He wondered if he'd had brain damage, or if perhaps he had some sort of brain tumor that was becoming malignant.
One thing he knew without question: Something was wrong. He knew his system like the inside of a ticking Swiss watch, from his thought processes to the regularity of his bowel movements. He was, for all his screaming abnormality and oversize bulk, a well-oiled human machine. He knew he was having "mental problems" of some kind. He was also certain that—by logical standards—he was not insane. Not by his criteria.
Bunkowski separated these mental problems into two parts: first, there was a vague torpor—as he thought of it; second, there were those physical manifestations that he could isolate as having begun sometime during his last period of drugged incarceration. When they'd prepared to let him out for the killing spree in Waterton, they had done something—either overdosed him in some form or struck him on the head while he was drugged. This was the hornet's nest, which was his way of thinking of the buzzing, dizzy sensation he had experienced a time or two since his release from the hole in Marion.
The torpor thing was what tugged at him. It was interfering with his day-to-day business, and affecting decisions. Making him act weirdly in his own eyes. He was doing things that made no sense—giving Miss Roach two hundred dollars unnecessarily, for example. Why hadn't he simply buried Miss Roach and put her out of her misery? Very disturbing.
It wasn't torpor at all, when he thought about it. For one thing, he never seemed to be horny anymore. Not that he was such a randy goat to begin with—it's just that he had normal desires for sex, at least in his mind they were normal. Another thing he'd noticed besides his unusual celibacy was that he didn't seem to find killing so much fun anymore. Sure, it had been pleasant, doing the bikers in their clubhouse, but there had been no true exhilaration as he'd felt in the past, no genuine sense of satisfaction.
There was nothing good that would come of thinking along these lines, he decided, and jerked his mind off of the subject—or tried to. He saw a rib joint, decided he was hungry, and pulled in. But as he got out of the car he was quite shaken by the realization that the act of killing was not acting as a catharsis, if indeed it ever had. This knowledge did not keep the desire for revenge from rumbling inside his gut like physical hunger for food, but he knew it was a bad omen. He was tasting something he could never completely eat. Like a drug addict who gets off the first time like a skyrocket, and then spends his life searching again and again for the perfect high he experienced with his initial experiment. He'll never find it, and perhaps inside he knows he'll never recapture it—but addiction (if only to selfrewards) supersedes logic.
Was he condemned to go on killing and killing, forever searching for the big release that would bring him peace of mind? When he destroyed the bikers, would that give him relief? Was there satisfaction waiting for him in the steamy red geyser that would pump from Mrs. Nadine Garbella's severed neck? Or was the only satisfaction in slaking his bloodthirst and heart hunger?
The taste of an enemy's life force did sound good. In fact, the thought of sinking those shark teeth into the hot, coppery, salty meat of a nice fresh heart made him so hungry he felt positively lightheaded.
A waitress or hostess welcomed him, asked him if he wanted a table for one, and he had to nod—he couldn't speak, his mouth was salivating so badly.
"Would you like a menu?"
"No," he said, swallowing. "Bring me ribs. How many in a side?"
"A side is a dozen ribs."
"Bring me six sides."
"Right away, sir," she said with a smile, hurrying off in the direction of the kitchen.
Ribs, hot and mouth-watering, and smothered in famous Heart of America Barbecue Sauce, was what this place did. So for the folks who came in and ordered ribs and nothing else, who didn't sit schmoozing over appetizers or drinkies from the bar, there was almost no wait for the food. If you were a table of twelve drunks, or a table with a couple of crying kids, you really got fast service—they wanted you to eat and run. It was all of a minute and a half before Daniel Edward Flowers Bunkowski was presented with his six steaming sides of Heart of America barbecued beef ribs.