The Holy Terror

By Wayne Allen Sallee

Copyright © 1992 Wayne Allen Salle

Introduction © 2008 Brian Hodge

Foreword © 2008 Wayne Allen Salle

First Digital Edition

Copyright 2010 Wayne Allen Sallee & Crossroad Press

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Acknowledgements

Dedication:

To everyone who has ever learned to survive this city, and who tried their best to meet its madness on their own terms.

Also, to Greg and Darcie Loudon, and their children, Ava, Quinn, and Luc. When they tire of their father’s tales of the crazy guy in all those illustrations, they might choose to pick up this book, and then it will all make some sense. Except the part where their father remained my closest friend to the very end.

In memory of my namesake, Wayne Henley, who passed away in Madisonville, Kentucky, on July 22nd 2007. I’ll always cherish his tales about my parents, Jim and Dolores, and their antics on Willard Court.

SATURDAY, MARCH 18th, 1989: TATTERED MOMENTS OF LUCIDITY

By Wayne Allen Sallee

I was history. For eighteen minutes, I was gone, away from this place, my subconscious looking for the Faceless One so I could wave and say “Hey, there’s my ride!” But I couldn’t wave if I wanted. While I was unconscious, three contusions in my head, both bones in my left forearm twisted through two layers of clothing and a padded winter jacket. I get sick to my stomach thinking about waking up from that nightscape and feeling fire on an icy street, the Pakistani guy from the corner store repeating over and over “Not to touch! Not to touch!” It is an amazing feeling to see your own fist in your jaw because you suddenly have an extra joint in your arm. I knocked out three of my teeth with my fist in the split-second before it turned to putty.

There is a history to this book. If you want to know more about the accident itself, there are other places to read about it, but I’d like this foreword to be unique, talking about the novel before you and not about my recovery. I want to try and explain why the book came out in 1992 but took place during the winter of 1988-1989. Twenty years ago since the Painkiller came into my head. And lived there for a long, long time.

For the first year or so after this novel was published (the book debuted at the second World Horror Convention in Nashville), those who knew my story often asked me to sign my name, or make an asterisk, midway down page 243, as it was in my typed manuscript. A scene where two cops are talking with an old woman on Mohawk Street while Barney Miller reruns blare in the background.

That page sat in my Smith-Corona word processor for thirty-eight days, gathering a thick line of dust. Because of the contusions, I could not have my arm operated on until the daily MRIs showed that I would not explode or bleed out or whatever the doctors thought might happen would happen, and for several weeks, my left hand would not move. Most of you know–and if you don’t, I’m sure the information is somewhere in the Googleverse–that I’ve had cerebral palsy on my right side since birth. My right hand is useless, my right eye a novelty. For those days I lay in Holy Cross Hospital, sharing the room at times with drunk drivers, drugged up mothers with a dozen kids, and a dead Lithuanian with no one to claim the body, I was a puppet with broken strings. I had to be fed. I had to be bathed. My chin wiped after I spilled from my sippy cup of the damned. You really don’t want to know how I urinated into the plastic jug, though to this day I recall the confidence brought on by my ingenuity.

It was 291 days before I could even move my hand, the last of seven casts coming off and freeing me, my palm wiped clean of love lines and life lines, smooth as a mannequin and the fingers and thumb that came with said store window display. For months after, my thumb and forefinger were taut, my other fingers curled inward. I was either pointing a gun or accusing my Higher Power for letting me live. When I was in the blackness that March 18, 1989 brought to me, I saw David Janssen– the Fugitive, of all people–stopping me from coming towards him, assuring me that it was not time yet. Then again, seeing Dr. Richard Kimble made sense, as he was always chasing after the one-armed man who killed his wife. I still can only use one finger to type, and have back and neck pain from that year with the weighted casts. I have the broken metal plates and screws in a small dish and the x-rays of my skull, which I obtained on the sly. It has taken me just under an hour to type this, wishing this wasn’t the dead of winter howling outside, because it is now that I have werewolf claws and a giant pain grin of quiet determination.

There are many people that I am indebted to over these past fifteen years, particularly Yvonne Navarro and Janet Winkler, who took much of their precious time away from their writing and teaching, respectively, to transcribe passages of the book after hearing my Demerol-induced words on one of those old-timey cassette recorders. Peggy Nadramia and Peter Gilmore, who edited GRUE magazine, read a short story I sent them called “The Holy Terror” and rejected it, telling me that this should be my first novel. Jeff VanderMeer ran the first chapters of the book in JABBERWOCKY, with another section appearing in Mark V. Zeising’s HOUSE MONKEY. Further inspiration came from Dennis Etchison, Joe R. Lansdale, and Steve Rasnic Tem, along with the late Karl Edward Wagner and J. N. Williamson, who encouraged me to write a first novel before I barely had a half-dozen stories in print. Along the way, Elizabeth Massie, Jeff Johnston, Joan VanderPutten, Kathleen Jurgens, Robert “Bayou Bob” Petitt and Sid Williams read pages and saw that I did not stray from the subject at hand.

The biggest thanks, in the here and now, is to Brian Hodge, who read the book years ago and wrote the introduction for the anniversary edition (also included in this digital edition). I can bet that some of you are reading this because Brian’s name appears in the bold print it deserves on the cover. Hopefully publisher Gilbert Schloss will let me slip this in, ( Editor's note:  He did, and I have included it here as well) that everyone not familiar with Brian’s work immediately go out (well go online, because that’s what everyone does now, right?) and buy MAD DOGS or WILD HORSES, and about eight other novels from the previous century. *

Much of the six block area of downtown Chicago described in my book is long gone, now there are condos where several buildings were once havens for the homeless, and vacant lots where my make-believe bar Nolan Void and St. Sixtus stood. High rise garages where the Trailways terminal provided the Painkiller with a temporary hiding place and, hell, even Dudley’s Carry-Outs, the best damn hot dog place in the city, is gone. Even the vacant lot between the Burger King and the Fine Arts Theater that “became” the Marclinn Home is now a partly-empty piece of ugly girders, supposedly which will one day house the CBS studios.

But they remain here in the pages of THE HOLY TERROR, circa our frigid winter of 1988-1989. The ghosts are still there, in yet another cold and dismal winter, paid forward twenty years in shards and tatters.

Your chattel,

Wayne Allen Sallee Burbank, Illinois 17 February 2008

* Editor's Note – the text for this edition has been recovered from a scan of the original book modified for the 15th anniversary edition.  I'd like to (proudly) note that author Brian Hodge will join us here at Crossroad Press eventually as well as several others mentioned in the above foreword.  All of us loved "The Holy Terror" - DNW

When a Prognosis is Just the Beginning

Brian Hodge

If novels—the physical books themselves—could be made more interactive, in poetic and appropriate ways, then the pages of The Holy Terror would fade to blank white soon after you read them. Not because they shouldn’t be preserved, but because this would echo one of the book’s central concerns.

The Holy Terror is a novel about invisible people.

Not the type of invisibility you see in movies, with seemingly empty suits of clothes bobbing along of their own volition, or footprints magically appearing across wet sand or dry floors.

No, these are people rendered invisible by nearly everyone else around them.

Unless you live in the smallest of small towns and have never left, you’ve almost certainly seen the people portrayed in these pages. You may also have pretended not to. Maybe they held out a cup, for the thousandth time that day, in hopes that you would drop some currency or coins into it. Maybe they were in a wheelchair. Maybe they weren’t, but walked funny. Or carried on conversations with partners you couldn’t see. Or maybe they did nothing to announce it overtly, but you still picked up a vibe that something was just a little different there.

And in that moment they became invisible, in a far more fundamental way than affects those with whom we engage in run-of-the-mill avoidance of eye contact on city streets. We quicken our step and walk on by as if they’re just. Not. There.

No judgments here. I do it too, and feel rather shamed by the admission.

I’m compelled to wonder why, exactly, we do it, although I can only rely on guesswork. It isn’t the sort of thing for which pollsters conduct surveys.

On the surface, there’s undoubtedly our resistance to a stranger, any stranger, who wants something from us, or merely has the potential to want something from us. Because that first innocuous request may only be the foot in the door: a quarter first, perhaps a piece of our soul next.

Better, then, to be wary.

But when we’re confronted with someone who is plainly broken, it goes deeper. We are confronted with something we can’t fix, and we hate that. We are met with pain we can’t assuage, and that makes us feel inadequate. We are witness to proof of chaos, manifested in an accident of physics or biology gone haywire, and the only thing worse than pondering ill will behind it is acknowledging that physics and biology don’t care about us in the first place. They govern life while disregarding the individual.

Things can fall apart; the center will not always hold.

It could happen to us, and being reminded is uncomfortable.

Better, then, not to see the messenger at all.

* * *

I don’t know when Wayne Allen Sallee stopped pretending not to see, if he ever pretended in the first place. I suspect he didn’t. You get the feeling reading The Holy Terror that most of its characters, both central and peripheral, come from people he’s known, talked with at length, met once, or exchanged a few quick words with without ever getting a name, and that he saw each one of them, up close, without ever looking away.

In describing them he uses language that may come as a surprise. Handicapped. Cripples. More. The novel was written and first published before such cringeworthy terms as differently-abled and challenged and, perhaps worst of all, handicapable, were injected into the lexicon, as if to soften the words would somehow mitigate the reality. Sallee could edit the original language if he wished—that’s easy to do with a book’s new edition—but why would he want to?

Nothing that matters has changed.

And writers are entitled to use the words that feel most honest.

I’ve been wrestling for a while with how much to mention here. There’s a factor that shouldn’t be ignored, or hurriedly glossed over, but neither should it take central spotlight:

When it comes to handicaps and crippling conditions, Wayne Allen Sallee knows what he’s talking about, all too well. His brain hemorrhaged when he was born and left him with the lifetime souvenir of cerebral palsy. Not long after I first got to know him, roughly twenty years ago, he was struck by a car and catapulted into the side of a Chicago Transit Authority bus. He’s been through more operations and procedures and endured more pain than any random handful of other people I know. From both near and far I’ve seen him contend with it all with gallows humor, stubborn willpower, and a tenacious refusal to let self-pity and anger take control; instead, he transmutes and channels them into more constructive outlets. His work varies, like that of all writers who keep at it for the right reasons—sometimes a scream, sometimes a flipped middle finger, sometimes a dissection—but it’s typically characterized by an empathy unusual in its depth, especially for fiction falling under the horror rubric.

In The Holy Terror, then, you will find a novel that was written straight from the heart, as many novels are, but as few can be. Its characters, many of them street people, and most in wheelchairs or otherwise in bodies that don’t work properly—“a prisoner of war to one’s own body,” in the novel’s words—are not exalted as noble role (or roll) models, dealing with whatever ails them with saintly stoicism. Neither are they the caricatures that might have resulted from a writer who didn’t understand what the world looks like through their eyes.

Instead, they’re just likeable, fallible, brave, and sometimes even ludicrous human beings, making their way with humor and bitterness and determination and sorrow and an occasional touch of grace, and always looking out for each other. Because they’re the ones best equipped to do it.

And they surely need to, now more than ever.

Because preying on Chicago’s population of disabled street people is the Painkiller, a serial murderer the likes of which you haven’t seen before. His methods are unique, and so is what compels him. He believes it to be God, and without a doubt he’s been touched by something, but there’s room enough here to make up your own mind. Just as valid an explanation is the alternative pantheon, the Givers of Pain and Rapture, imagined by the novel’s main conscience, Vic Tremble.

When I first read The Holy Terror, in 1992, I’d never heard of Amma, Mata Amritanandamayi, known as “the hugging saint,” and who has by now embraced roughly 30 million people around the world. I’ve been brought to tears by stories of some of the people she’s welcomed into her arms, people whom you can imagine haven’t been touched by another human being in years.

But I thought of her while rereading the novel the other day. It struck me that Amma’s simple mission of love and unconditional acceptance and truly seeing whoever approaches her is one of the purest affirmations of life I’ve ever heard of…

And that the mission of the Painkiller is its inverse, with death coming not from animosity, but from a grotesquely mutated form of compassion.

* * *

The same day I began rereading The Holy Terror, I saw an article on ABC News’ web site about Huang Chuancai, a 32-year-old man in China undergoing treatment for neurofibromatosis, a rare genetic condition that caused him to develop 50 pounds of facial tumors. Several photos supplemented the article, and drove home the severity of Huang’s condition as newsroom prose couldn’t. Imagine a large, heavy, sandbag made of skin draped over a skull and loosely molded with human features.

His hands, though, were exquisite, the hands of a pianist, or the hands of Yo-Yo Ma, photographed in repose against his cello. Even here, in a man whose disfigurement is believed to be the worst of its kind in the world, there was beauty, if you could see it.

Some did. In the Comments section, most people were kind. A few tiny minds couldn’t resist making jokes. But most were deeply kind, offering words of compassion and wishes for the success of his treatments that Huang Chuancai will probably never see, although I like to think that something gets through to him.

One comment stuck with me, although perhaps not for the obvious reasons: I believe people like this man are a test for the rest of us, to see if we are cruel or kind in our hearts.

It stuck with me, unnervingly so, because a test implies someone who gives it.

Someone who grades.

Those who pass and those who fail.

Most of all, it implies that someone else has been picked to be that test, whether by accident or design, through physics or biology, or even by Givers of Pain and Rapture.

And if you’re brave enough, or compassionate enough, or cruel enough to wonder what that must be like, keep reading. You’re about to walk in those shoes, with someone who knows the way.

Brian Hodge Boulder, CO January 2008

The First And Last St. Vitus Dance

Chicago's Near North Side:

Friday 1 December, 1958

They had been snickering in the back row of the classroom, prematurely dismissing Sister Kara Veronica’s readings of the class’s Good Samaritan compositions in favor of discussing whether or not you’d be able to pick your nose if your hand didn’t have any bones in it, when the fire that killed ninety-five children and three nuns broke out. It was 2:37 in the afternoon.

The sixth grade’s homework assignment the night before had been to write three hundred words on a Good Samaritan story of their own; the three boys in the last row had listened to the first story only because one of the three, Frankie Haid, had been the author. The black-haired boy who had a face still rounded by baby fat and squinty blue eyes set into sockets like horizontal thumbprints would always have a way with words.

Especially when it came to bastardizing Bible stories.

His composition, meticulously printed onto pale tan foolscap paper, the loops of his small e’s and a’s properly touching the forest green dotted-line that ran halfway between the solid lines, was the usual classic. The parochial school had discontinued purchasing that type of foolscap a year earlier, but several of St. Vitus’ nuns would not think of ordering new supplies until the old were depleted.

Jim McCoppin and Freddy Gorshin had never doubted their friend’s ability. They both had gassed it up as the penguin read Haid’s little gem. What it was, this Samaritan helps this kid, a real holy terror in the neighborhood, who cracks up on his Schwinn, but only after some greaser makes book with the prone kid’s record box filled with 45s of labeled-by-the-penguin JD’s like Eddie Cochran, Elvis Presley, and Chuck Berry.

The good nun had commented that, while Haid’s story was filled with “modern-day jingoisms,” he once again showed his talent for “presenting a cohesive bonding between religious cornerstones and present-day situations.”

“In other words,” McCoppin snickered to his friend when the sister was through yakking, “the same old happy horseshit!” That would be the last commentary on life he would make before dying in the burn ward of Lutheran Deaconess Hospital three days later.

“Aww,” Freddy Gorshin mugged. “Widdle Fwancis is the penguin’s pet! I’d bet you’d make a great altar boy, Frankie, because you’d do anything to please Sister Sagging Titties!” The blond boy, who had been putting his father’s Wildroot in his hair ever since Charles Starkweather’s picture ran in the Daily News back in February, flashed a limp wrist.

Haid then commented on how it looked like Freddy didn’t have any bones in his hand, and that was how the three boys came to their scientific discussion in the minutes before all hell broke loose.

Veronica had started reading a paper by Billy “Pencil Neck” Dulcette, and Haid, bored, was looking without interest at the alphabet flashcards above the blackboard. Freddy, following on Frankie’s idea, was pushing his finger loosely into the side of his nose. Aa is for Apple, Bb is for book...

When the fire alarm suddenly went off, most everybody held their cheer behind silent masks; with any luck, the drill would take them through the three-thirty bell and that would be all she wrote. Three dozen chairs pushed away from their desks, each scraping across unwaxed red and tan checkerboard tiles.

Haid lost track of his compatriots almost immediately. Veronica wagged a liver-spotted finger to separate the class into proper order. Frankie took great joy in hearing the penguin babble about proper Catholic grade school discipline, and how her little cherubs would never behave like the public school hooligans at Wells or Peabody. “On the beam, chop-chop,” she droned on. “We’ll show those whipsnappers, all righty.”

Haid was staring wistfully out the window at the deserted basketball courts across California Avenue, in Humboldt Park, and watched an old newspaper flip across the concrete three times before the penguin finally opened the door to Room 217. The hallway was a buzzing hive given direction by the sharp adult commands of Sisters Vesna and Benatrix. The squeak of patent leather shoes echoed down the halls, making Haid think of mice in a sewer.

“Single file, as we practiced.” Veronica’s face twitched. “Billy, you and Phillip Morrow hold the double doors open for your fellow classmates. P.D.Q., boys!”

Haid thought that the two brown noses looked hilarious, moving in a kind of duckwalk to the far end of the corridor. They opened the doors as if they were ushers at the Blackstone. Haid saw wisps of smoke like winter breaths coming up from beneath the second set of doors.

“Okay, cherubs, on the beam!” Veronica barked as the screams suddenly erupted from below. Haid’s eyes darted around, the alarm box above his head resembled a giant red tarantula. But the siren he was now hearing was coming from somewhere outside—the fire trucks from LeMoyne Street!—made him realize that this wasn’t a drill.

Everybody lost all rationality at this point. Haid watched the cords in the nun’s neck become more defined as she, he was sure, struggled to hold back her panic.A moment later, he could no longer see Veronica, as the second set of doors were opened and greyish brown smoke engulfed one-third of the students. He thought he heard someone whispering The Lord’s Prayer and he hoped that it wasn’t himself.

A crowd in panic: all logic gone from every living, breathing individual. They rush and press against doors meant to open inward. In 1904, half a thousand lives were lost in the fire at the Iroquois Theater on Randolph Street, the exit doors remaining closed due to the pressing weight of the crowd. The city fire laws hadn’t changed in the fifty-four years since.

Haid saw things like in that commercial on TV, with the pearl falling ever so slowly down the bottle of Prell shampoo.

A boy next to him started keening like a dog. He watched a kid named Mahl shit in his pants right in front of him, twin streams of lumpy liquid streaming from the legs of his regulation, navy blue slacks. Veronica looked like The Bride of Frankenstein, transfixed as her little charges stumbled around her, arms outstretched for impending crucifixions or forming X shields in front of their round faces. They banged into lockers, water fountains, and themselves as the smoke and confusion grew thicker by the second.

Oddly, Haid thought of a passage Veronica had read aloud just the week before, on how, in the 1300s, French townspeople celebrated the festival of Saint John the Baptist by dancing in near delirium, until they fell to the ground, their limbs flailing uncontrollably. This spectacle came to be known as Chorea Sancti Viti, or St. Vitus Dance.

That’s what it looked like everybody was doing. Only it was much more refined: the rigors of Catholicism did not mean that the children would conform to the actions of the French peasants. Janet Mandeen puked onto the lockers to her right, the lunch hour meal of fish sticks and green Jell-O not yet digested. The vomit stuck thickly to the tan and silver doors. Others beside her were crying, snot coming out of their noses like opaque soap bubbles.

He was crying now, too. And he hated crying, because it reminded him of being a baby and how his mother would pull the bars on his crib higher and tie the pillowcase loosely around his face so that he wouldn’t cry out when she let the mailman in.

Thinking about Doreen Madsen Haid—his mother, the slut—made him forget the panic that was rising up within him, so he stayed with it. The hate he felt for his dead mother was that strong. His mother would bed down with the mailman or the kid who delivered sandwiches for Ricky’s or just about anybody while his dad was out driving an armored car for Thillens.

Dad had cleared out after he eventually figured things out, and he and Mom had moved into his Uncle Vince’s two--flat on Potomac Street, just a few blocks away from the school here on Crystal Street. Haid had despised her so much that he could have cared less when she drove her Chevrolet Biscayne into a Division Street trolley. Now, even though Uncle Vince Janssen made Frankie do some things that he really didn’t like doing, he still called him Father.

He tried thinking of his new Father, of the way he smiled when he gave Frankie his bath, lathering him up good, and then the first set of doors were beside him. Their rubber wedges were still in place. Haid kicked one of them and the door loosened. A crayon-scrawled snow scene adorned a tattered sheet of white construction paper in one corner of the beveled glass. Frosty the Snowman kicking his heels up, real jazzy like on the cartoon Frazier Thomas shows on Garfield Goose and Friends. The kid who drew the scene had used orange crayon on the trees in the background, as if Frosty was running from the sunlight. One vertical edge of the paper drawing had begun to curl up the way his mother’s L & M’s had. She had never bothered to take the cigarette out while scolding him.

Seeing Dulcette’s shadow through the smoke made him stop thinking about dear, departed mom. His lunkhead classmate had loosened his standard Catholic school tie, yanked his standard Catholic school starched white shirt up around his thin face. The top half of his head was smoothed by sweat.

Haid thought of Dulcette’s courage in the moments before he screamed was a true act of foolishness. He had been standing sentry-like nearest where the smoke was blackest. Who was he trying to impress? Maybe he wanted to be a martyr like the child saint that the school was named after. St. Vitus, patron saint of comedians and epileptics. What a combo. Go figure, man. Haid could see Uncle Milty on his knees at night, praying.

His left foot was firmly planted on the first of six steps to the landing—doubling back down six more to the first floor and they were almost home free—when Dulcette screamed.

He did so because a tongue of flame had climbed around the metal bannister and ignited the sleeve of his blazer. The boy, inches from Haid, made a low, wailing sound. His eyes grew to the size of pie pans, despite the smoke.

Mesmerized by the red and orange flames climbing up his fellow student’s arm like a keener version of The Blob in all its Technicolor, Haid was only vaguely aware of the gasps of terror that were spreading behind him. He could only see Dulcette, Billy Dulcette with the pencil neck, whose father worked at Buler’s and was probably tearing down Washtenaw Avenue this very second, a real cool dad who would pass out dimes to all of his son’s friends so that they could buy Archie and Casper and Flash comics from the stand up machine next to the freezers. Billy Dulcette who really wasn’t that much of a lunkhead -- hey, God, are you listening here? -- and who was now moving his jaw with a painful, counter-clockwise slowness, as if he was patiently going for the biggest gum bubble blown in Chicago grade school history. Dumb fucking listen to the penguin Dulcette, that same senile biddy who was at that second spitting up Kyrie Eleisons and Heavenly Fathers left and right and who was about to see the first death at her hands occur because Haid knew that the lunkhead kid with the really cool father was doomed even before the fifth or sixth tongue of flame ignited the boy’s hair.

He was close enough to feel the flames in his nostrils as Dulcette ignited in one great phumf! Dulcette’s slicked back hair uncoiled in wild ropes, some strands falling clear as if sheared, others were firecracker wicks ending in sputtering red. The boy moved then, doing an insanely graceful turn, just as the crowd behind Haid swelled outward like a hemorrhage about to burst.

Haid couldn’t move quick enough; the quivering mass of panicked children pushed against him in several places. His knees buckled on the threshold of the second step down. Unable to catch his balance, he threw his arms out to either side, and his right arm jabbed someone’s rib cage. His left fingers scrabbled over the red-hot railing, and he was surprised to hear his own shrieks as the flesh on his palm fused to the railing’s lower rung.

He twisted his neck to the left and saw Pat Carlson, a bookish JD whose only desire was to grow up to look like Sal Mineo, fall into the Dulcette candle and scream silently. Several students had stumbled over Haid, now in a kneeling position. He was weary, feeling like he did during summer swims at his Aunt Dot’s and had stayed underwater too long. Everything hurt him. At least, he thought he couldn’t possibly hurt any more.

Then somebody stepped on his leg and he felt, more than heard, it crack.

Broken. Going to die. Going to die. He bit his lip. Dried from the smoke, the skin split open wide. He had to think clearly now or he would be dead. He heard the urgent banging of fists on lockers as the rows of children who had stumbled over him reached the first floor.

The sound faded for just a second, like when he was listening to someone talk and he’d yawn in the middle of one of their sentences, because the railing toppled over, angling sharply towards the mid-floor landing. Haid screamed louder now, tears hot on his face, as skin from three of his fingers ripped away from the muscle. The L--shaped railing smashed above the far wall, hitting just above the ancient stencil of a ghostly hand, palm forward. Barely visible through the smoke, Haid could just make out the red sign that meant stop, the Don’t Run admonishment equally spectral. The wall cracked in several places, the palm spattering with the darker red and grey as two of the taller boys had their skulls shattered by the metal projectile.

He held onto the concrete steps as well as he could, his entire body numbing in pulsating waves. His dead left hand spasmed as another body fell forward out of the swirling grey and sprawled across his forearm. His fingers curled under the step, the blackened tissue caressing a molten piece of old chewing gum. Through the black motes clutching the corners of his vision, Haid saw the fused mess of Dulcette and Carlson and a dozen gaping faces framed in the grid patterns of support as the railing crashed down upon them. The first and last St. Vitus dance raged on.

The landing broke apart in chunks. The ceiling, aflame, caved in and Haid was falling through space, madly imagining death singing a Buddy Holly tune to him: All of my love, all of my kissin’, you don’t know what you’ve been missin’, oh boy...

He landed ass-first amongst the bodies and the rubble, the steaming railings and demolished lockers, nearly unconscious in the first row of the Buddy Holly After-Life Concert.

After an unknown time, he opened his eyes. The lids felt as if lead weights were attached to them. Everything was fragmented for a moment, making Haid think that there were stitches in his retinas. The railing, along with the severed door of a locker, was wrapped around his lower legs. His next thought was that he would be crippled.

A still, dead form of a blond-haired girl lay near him. Their eyes met. Haid thought that there was something wrong with the way her lifeless eyes stared him down. He felt as if he was being accused of something. The sirens, the fire alarms, the quiet moaning of the survivors; all had become muffled and Haid realized that there was a wetness in his ear. He was hypnotized by the girl’s stare. Much of her white blouse had burned away; a gilded chain that read Jesus Loves lay on her underdeveloped chest. Her nipples resembled uncooked pepperonis.

He wondered if much of his own skin was missing. On the way back from his Auntie Emma’s house in Shelbyville a few summer’s back, he’d memorized a road sign for shaving lotion. He lit a match, to check gas tank, and now they call him, Skinless Frank. BURMA SHAVE. He looked at the girl again and understood what was different about her stare.

The dead girl’s eyelids had burned completely off.

Haid stared into the clear, beautiful, unseeing blue of her eyes, spoiled only by specks of dust in the whites, following their curvature until he could see the rinds that were the upper ridges of her sockets. He did this again and again until the wetness from his ear dripped onto his jaw.

Then he passed out again.

* * *

He awoke to sounds of mild weeping. Soft prayer. The ceiling above him had split into a gaping V, tiny blots of plaster rained down on everything like hail. He could feel a dozen things pressing against him. Hard as metal, soft as flesh.

The girl with no eyelids and the Savior’s name on her chest—yea, right! Tell me another one, J.C—would still be on his left, near the first set of lockers. He turned his head and an ice pick skipped across the hollow of his collarbone. He fought off the greyness again.

One of the toppled lockers was open, its door swaying slightly the way Haid’s new Father let his arm swing from the bathtub when the two men took their “Friday Night Soaking.” A boy’s tempera paint printing read I LOVE THE CATHOLIC CHURCH. Somebody a semester later had blacked out the last word in marker, replacing it with the word CUNTS. Not any more, you don’t, Haid thought, looking at a bloodied hand.

Several of his teeth were loose, he discovered when he tried to laugh. His head fell back down with a thump, the same sound his Father’s Biblija Swieta made when it was closed shut on the end table. Plaster fell and settled onto his face.

Far off, he heard sirens and brakes and shouting. A piece of cardboard fluttered down from above and he wondered if anybody was alive up there. The cardboard was a blue and white sign that read ALL EMPLOYEES MUST WASH HANDS BEFORE RETURNING TO WORK. CLEANLINESS IS NEX with the rest burned off for all time. The janitor’s reminder hit Haid’s arm and he barely felt it.

He heard approaching footsteps. When he had the strength and the curiosity to look at the girl again, she was gone. He had dreamt her being there. Simple as that.

Then he heard a sigh that wasn’t his own. Someone else was alive. He turned toward the direction of the voice. Past where the girl he had dreamt about lay.

“Father’s come.”

Uncle Vince? Was that really his Father? No, it didn’t sound like him, no, it was a fireman, it— He focused in on a man bending over a burnt boy. “Father’s come to take you home.”

That wasn’t his Father, but now he knew that he’d be saved. They would all be saved.

The man lifted the boy, the skin in tatters. The boy looked like a pile of filthy shag carpeting and he was still breathing! The fireman’s build was large, and he was spattered with gore. But his chest was strangely dry and it seemed to glow softly. But this was only Haid’s delirium. Or so he told himself.

“Come to God,” the man spoke softly.

The pain heightened. Haid grimaced, trying to remember the hate he held for his mother, the defiance he had once had, saying the word pussy in the school yard that very first time.

The man’s beard was white, clipped neatly the way Mitch Miller wore his. Father watched SING ALONG WITH MITCH every Friday night. Haid would watch it with him later, when he got home. The bell would ring soon.

“Many are the sufferings of the just,” the man began reciting, holding the broken boy closer to his chest. “And from them all, the Lord has delivered them; the Lord preserves all their bones, not one of them shall be broken.”

The man made the sign of the cross by bobbing his head. He began squeezing the boy in his arms, and Haid wanted to cry out, but blood slid down his throat instead.

He was pushing the boy into his chest—into his goddamn chest! Like something out of CREATURE FEATURES! Haid wished he had tears left to cry.

(gone the boy was gone like the girl like Gorshin and the penguin, oh, for chrissakes)

Wanted to cry, because the man stood, his knees cracking, and began to come towards Haid.

“No,” Haid managed to croak.

“Thou shalt have no dogs befoul me,” the man whispered, and it made no sense at all.

Had he heard it right? The man’s face trembled to Haid’s shudders.

“Come to God.” The man’s touch was warm, like Father massaging his thighs in the bathtub. He felt a sharp tingling in his crotch. He was getting an erection, so why was he afraid?

The man was lifting him slowly, like a baby needing to be burped, and Haid’s shoulders touched the man’s warm and dry chest.

“God wants you home, son. He’s in here.”

Haid felt his body relaxing with a final hitch; the fireman was going to make him okay. He stared down, his one cheek against the man’s rib cage, his grey parka smelling freshly-laundered...

A bloody tear ran down his forehead, hitting the man’s jacket. It fizzled like a candle flame winking out when you pressed your fingers against it. The bloody tear was gone.

Like the broken boy and the girl with no eyelids.

Gone to God.

He heard screaming then, without ever knowing if it was his.

Others ran over towards him. They would save him. He wasn’t ready to go to God yet. Why was this man pretending to be someone good and killing the kids who survived? What right did he have to play—

“At rest in the fields of the Lord,” the man whispered, as if he had heard Haid’s thoughts.

“Who are you?” Haid spoke with blood bubbling out of his mouth.

“I had tried to take you home, as I had been taught by Him before me. Jesus wept.” The sounds of the men from the LeMoyne Street fire house were closer now.

The man who would be Frankie Haid’s savior turned toward the others. “I was passing by and saw the fire,” he simply said. He turned back to Haid and whispered. “I was called, as you will one day be.”

“We need all the Good Samaritans we can get,” the fireman replied.

The man in the windbreaker smiled at that, and no one paid much mind when he left. Perhaps it was good, he thought. Because of the interruption, he had not taken the boy’s true pain away and shown him to gloryland. But he had held onto him long enough to release the power of God within him. The same had happened to him so long ago, when another nameless man, another Good Samaritan, had found his own body in the wreckage of a theater, barely breathing...

Yes, it was good that he had passed the power of God on to the boy. It was the right thing to do.

Jesus wept.

Haid was crying watery tears free of blood now and the real firemen couldn’t understand why some of the burn tissue looked pink and healed. Bone shards still protruded from his leg, but the skin under his burned shirt was fresh and new...

God wants you to do his work... Son.

Haid passed out for the final time that day.

* * *

Years later, Francis Madsen Haid would be sitting in front of a television at Massie’s Bar on Augusta Boulevard, flanked by losers like Dennis Cassady and others embittered over their trapped lives. He would be drinking a draft beer and watching the hostages gaining their release from captivity in Iran, when a news bulletin of local interest flashed across the bottom of the screen. Many of the patrons had to read aloud, word for word, as they did with severe weather watches.

The news item would say that a forty year old Bucktown man had confessed to starting a fire at the St. Vitus catholic school on Crystal and California Streets in 1958. The man’s name was Jeffrey DiMusi and he had been reprimanded earlier that winter by one of the nuns for smoking in a stairwell. To avoid being caught a second time, he had hurriedly tossed his lit cigarette into that same stairwell.

DiMusi would commit suicide at Cook County Hospital the next night, but for long hours before that, Haid would recall the fire and the falling.

He remembered God coming through the flames and embracing him, soothing him and telling him to come home. He could barely remember more than that.

He could recall the man’s caress.

But not the terror he had felt.

The holy terror.

Chicago’s South Loop:

Winter 1988

This tired city was somebody’s dream

Billboard horizons as black as they seem

Four level highways across the land

We’re building a home for the family of man

And it’s so hard whatever we are coming to

Yes it’s so hard with so little time

And so much to do

Time running out for the family of man

-”Family of Man” THREE DOG NIGHT

Chapter One

“Man, ain’t you ascared some big ol’ maggot goan crawl down that hole in your throat, you come in here looking like that?” Reginald Givens gave Mike Surfer the badeye—a variation of the one he saved up for his parole officer—as he watched his friend wipe the piece of plastic free of spittle.

“First, I done been in here twenty damn minutes,” Surfer’s voice was smoother than that of the younger man across from him. “Here” was the Hard Times Lounge on Randolph and Canal, and he’d hoped his voice had carried enough so that Chet the bartender would see fit to bring him a lousy draft. “Second, it only takes a second. See it’s already back, and here comes Chet. Order up, Reggie, I picksed up my disability check today.”

“Man’s got it hard, with they only selling Old Style on tap.” Givens still had the mouth that got him into Joliet when he was barely old enough to set on a bar stool, let alone drink.

“Hush,” Surfer patted his hand on the table. “Seem’ as it’s free...” He raised two fingers, giving a Sideways nod at his short friend.

“I know, I know. Don’t you think you might want to go to the baffroom when you clean that thing in your throat?” Givens wasn’t letting up on that one thing. Both men were black and both were in wheelchairs, as well. Three years after his last stint at the Correctional Center, Reginald Givens had gotten himself faced and fallen onto the elevated tracks on Kinzie. The passing Ravenswood All-Stops had successfully amputated his right leg at the knee.

Michael Surles, who called himself Mike Surfer because of the ease with which he maneuvered the streets of the Loop and West Side, was a hydrocephalic. He had been a syphilis baby, as there are crack babies today, and he had worn a plastic shunt around his neck for all of the forty-seven years of his life. The shunt was the thing Givens had been talking about. Commonly known as water on the brain, the disease is an excessive accumulation of CSF—cerebro-spinal fluid—in the brain. Surfer’s shunt, a circular device which resembled nothing so more than a cheap medallion from a sixties science-fiction show, fit on a tan velcro strap into a tracheotomy hole just below his Adam’s apple. His disease was not of severity, but his neck muscles were weak, and a bulging forehead gave his eyes a downward cast.

The latter characteristic suited him just fine, as he looked at himself in the mirror thinking his eyes made him into a black, hipper, version of Steve Carella, from the 87th Precinct novels. Surfer was a resident at the Rainey Marclinn Home down Randolph, as was Givens, and Wilma Jerrickson, another tenant, often let him read cop novels by Ed McBain and Elmore Leonard.

“Just you drink,” Surfer told him with a beer foam moustache over his own grey one. “And be glad you only got that.” He nudged Givens’ stump under the table with his foot.

“Enough to groin you on the street you want to clown, man.”

“I’m sayin’ is, lighten up, is all.” The two men drank their beer in silence for a time. Hard -Times Lounge was a misnomer of sorts, because, although it catered to a few loose psychos from the Halsted Street skids two blocks to the west beyond the Kennedy overpass, the majority of the clientele worked in River Plaza, where the offices of Social Security and Disability were located. Which was how the men in the chairs and canes ended up here. Chet the bartender took care of them even when they hadn’t come from picking up a check, and he’d cash it for them on the days that they did.

“Goan be chillin’ this winter.” Givens offered up in apology. “Leg’s already throbbing, it’s only November.”

Someone in the shadows went up to the Seeberg juke and punched in “Luckenbach, Texas.”

“Waylon and his ol’ Willie,” Givens said.

* * *

The two men had parted after they had crossed the river at Wacker. As much as Reginald complained about the cold, he was still a hustler at heart. It was only two in the afternoon. Two hours of daylight left, Surles figured his friend for having a decent game of monte going on soon enough. The shills would supplement his disability check but good.

“Got to have the faif, man.” Givens had waved.

“Yea, faith. Keep on keepin’,” Surfer had returned, with so little conviction towards his friend’s equating religion and criminality that he did not bother to cover his shunt with his forefinger. He doubted that Reg would have been listening, even if his response had been audible.

Back in the Hard Times, he was no stranger to most of the steadies there. No one would give it a second glance when he touched either forefinger to the plastic device whenever speaking. As with most of the Marclinn’s residents, many of his moves were unconscious.

Many of the late-afternoon crowd and storefront employees knew him as well, and sometimes, when his personal pain was darkest, Surfer thought that maybe they smiled only out of relief because he was not looking for a handout.

Now that he was past the incline of North Wacker Drive, he reached into his white sidepack—10th Annual Ortho-Olympics stenciled in blue across the pack, his name and address back when he lived on Keystone across the flap in red—and pulled out a cassette-Walkman. Flipped in a tape of sixties beach music.

“Ride, ride, ride, the wild surf...” he sang, passing the United Cerebral Palsy building at 318 West. Waved hello to Miss DeWalt as she rushed back from lunch. In front of the Randolph Towers a block east, old Chubby Lovell pandered for the tourists who went into the lobby’s McDonald’s.

Surfer had told Chubby Love he should pick a location opposite a lesser landmark than Capone’s Bismarck Hotel. He’d make more jingle on the State Street Mall.

He had plenty of room once he hit the 100 block. The silver arc of the State of Illinois Building to his left, City Hall kat-corner, Surfer just wished that the pedway under the two blocks was accessible to those in wheelchairs. Sometimes he really didn’t understand what each new mayoral administration was bragging about. And he didn’t think things would be any better if Richard Daley Jr. was elected in April.

So he made do with the wide open expanse, letting the songs of Jan & Dean or The Hondells - keep him from shivering too much. He saw Blackstone Shatner out hustling up pennies by the Greyhound Terminal. The guy drank his wine from an old detergent measuring cup and he wasn’t even clownin’ when he did it. Surfer wondered how Givens was making out. The three wrought-iron sculptures atop theMarclinn’s doors were less than a block away. At least, he would be out of the cold.

Chapter Two

Today was the day that he would save the three card monte dealer and take him to gloryland. The man that tomorrow’s papers would call The Painkiller was certain of this and he felt good.

At twenty after three that Thursday evening, Francis Madsen Haid walked past an orange Volkswagen Beetle that had been abandoned in the alley off Tooker Street. It effectively blocked the entrance to his first floor apartment, but since Uncle Vince’s death in September, he hadn’t had any need for maneuvering room for his beloved Father’s wheelchair. In addition, the ancient car succeeded in blocking any strays who might come across the smell and become inquisitive...

He figured that he had a good hour of daylight to catch up with the monte dealer. Of all those in the chairs that needed saving, Haid had found himself thinking with increasing frequency that the dealer wanted it most of all. Father seemed to agree. And in the two months Haid had been walking the streets, searching, recalling faces and hangouts, he knew that the dealer would be flipping the cards on Couch Street, a glorified alley behind the United Cerebral Palsy building. That was his destination.

His sparse blond hair whipping across his forehead in a November wind that came in off the lake, he made several strides toward’s the alley’s entrance on Dearborn Street before turning back and rechecking that the door had been locked securely. It had been double-locked, but he still had to look.

When he had walked down Dearborn past Chicago to Superior, he still fought an urge to go back and check the lot. But the patch of lighter grey in the overcast sky was dropping further behind the CHA projects. Today was the day he would finally make Father proud.

* * *

Today would be best for the crippled man, of this he was certain. The weather was playing havoc with his own limbs, he knew that the other’s pain must be a hundred times worse. Trapped in the chrome cell of the chair. Yes, the man would welcome his presence and thank him.

On his way to Couch Street, it was only across the river and he’d be there in a moment, Haid stopped in front of a strip joint in the 400 block of North Clark. One of those places where you paid to stick your dingus through a slot and a woman in a booth would suck it. He stopped because the weathered brown door opened and a white man in a wheelchair—he had a bushy brown beard and Haid suspected him to be a veteran of Vietnam—rolled down the step. His features were washed in the lilac neon surrounding the windows. The neon said Bare Bodies and Sex Stage. A man of about the same age followed the other down towards the Merchandise Mart, but Haid knew that they were not together by the way the walking man, with shoulder-length blond hair falling over a black suede jacket, regarded the other. His gaze was constantly going back to the man in the chair, who was making somewhat better time down the block.

The two went in opposite directions when they reached Hubbard. Haid had never met either man before, and seeing the man in the wheelchair coming out of a place like that brought up a slew of questions. The man was following Haid’s own path. He continued watching the guy roll along, wondering what kind of woman was sick enough to stuff a limp piece of flesh in her mouth.

* * *

All the wannabe players were gone to their Metra trains or happy hours—it used to be inthis city, happy hour meant cheap liquor; now the original premise was illegal, and all the bars could do was offer free pizza and shit like that in those hours before the Loop shut down. But for the Polish cleaning women, and they didn’t drink.

So there wasn’t a whole hell of a lot Reginald Givens could do but scrounge for a bottle or some recyclable aluminum cans. His deck of cards, the imprint of the Caeser’s Palace casino on one side, lay in his lap, yet to be boxed, which included the red queen with the subtle fold that gave a monte dealer his edge.

Francis Haid watched the man in the chair rummage through a cyclone garbage can, a Vrdolyak sticker slapped on at knee-level. He was at the corner of Wacker and Couch, the black hustler about a quarter of a block in. The dealer’s arm moved within the depths of the trash as might the hand of a near-sighted man who has dropped his glasses onto the living room carpet. He found nothing worth saving, and looked down at the garbage in disgust.

The November sky had been pregnant with rain for two days and the first drops started to fall. Both men cursed their respective gods. Haid speculated briefly that some might consider rain to be a kind of divine intervention.

The few stragglers along Wacker raised their umbrellas or made their Tribunes and Enquirers into tents and went dashing off. Something else for them to complain about. Bastards didn’t know anything about pain, Haid thought. Then, time to make my move.

Standing there a few steps into the glorified alley—given a street name designation so that the delivery people could find the back entrance—Haid breathed once, twice, and let his heartbeat slow. He figured that this was how you felt right before losing your virginity. He started walking towards the hustler.

Into the shadows now. He heard sounds familiar to most Chicago neighborhoods at night: the muffled crumpling of newspapers, the clinking of bottles. He also heard the scrape of the wheelchair’s frame against the metal compactor.

Givens looked up when he heard Haid unzipping his jacket. He had a knotted hand wrapped around a prize: a green bottle with a few swigs of wine at the bottom. The hustler gave Haid a gap-tooth grin.

“Hello.” Haid stood there with his hands in his pockets, his shadow angling up the cracked brick wall behind him. His first word was an offering. He felt so sad for this man who scrounged for a few drops of liquor. Father was right.

And Thy will be done. Or so he had been told in parochial school, before the fire changed everything.

“Been a bad day by all reckonin’,” Givens said, by way of explanation of his actions. “I won’t be makin’ a mess here like some people been known t’do.”

He thinks I’m going to yell at him, Haid thought with a smile on his face. Givens found the smile to be a good sign.

“Can I maybe int’rest you in a game of monte? Watch where the red queen is and...”

“No,” Haid interrupted gently. “Let’s just … talk a minute. Okay?”

“Why, you see me with anything better to do, best bring it to my attention!” He noticed the two fingers of Night Train at the bottom of the flask. “Well, howdydo dedo.”

He was addressing the bottle directly. Haid had reached into an inside pocket and pulled out a tiny black book, out of habit. Practicing the psalms.

Givens licked the lip of the bottle after wiping it with his sleeve, grinning up at Haid like a kid who had shit in his pants and thought the whole thing was fun tried to convey the message to his parent.

Haid stepped forward, Psalm 50 clear in his mind. A section of it was part of an advertisement on the Division Street bus, but it had also been a favorite of Father’s.

The hustler-turned-lush probed the inside of the upturned bottle with his tongue, then smacked his lips. The lower lip covered the upper lip on his right side as if like a kid trying to remember the answer to a tough question on a test. ”Name’s Reggie.” He offered up to Haid.

“Let me hear sounds of joy and gladness,” the taller man responded. His arms outstretched, Haid’s black turtleneck pulled up out of the waistband of his pants as he moved to embrace the black man.

“Hey, what?” Givens dropped the bottle. It hit Haid on the foot. Haid grabbed the other man, who now seemed pitifully small, at the shoulders. The man was shaking and Haid wanted to cry out in the coming rapture.

“I know a cop...”

“And I know Father,” Haid pulled the dealer closer, felt the man’s breath against his abdomen. He finished his recital.

“Let the bones which thou has crushed rejoice. Restore me to the joy of my salvation...”

Haid pulled the man forward, not upward. He grunted, misjudging the weight. But it was the first time of many. He would learn.

The remainder of Givens’ sounds were muffled. Haid did not intend to crush the man’s bones. Father wanted him intact. There was a suffused glow between his chest and Givens’ face.

When the flesh—his flesh—yielded, the man in the chair tried to scream and, for the briefest moment before he went inside, Haid felt his teeth trying to bite into his shirt.

Then his head was inside of Haid, Father telling him to keep on, Haid pulling forward in the most holy of all embraces, pushing shoulders closer towards him. His own shoulders becoming hunched with the effort, someone looking on might have thought Haid to be a Dr. Jekyll who had just partaken of his potion.

He could not believe how soundless it all was, as the crippled man’s flesh rippled beneath his clothes and he was consumed whole. He wasn’t certain why Givens’ bulky jacket and shirt followed him to the gloryland; Father had always said that you were naked in Heaven.

The body hadn’t even convulsed. By the time Haid had pulled Givens up into his chest to his waist, the legs were limp and even colder than they had been.

He stopped to catch his breath, noticing that it had stopped raining. Or maybe it was the soft glow around him. Improvising now, he pushed the wheelchair gently backwards into the side of the garbage compactor. A wedge so that he could simply lean in and consume the hustler’s legs, which he pulled up to lay on the seat of the chair.

He hadn’t really given much thought to it taking this long, but Father helped him through it. As he had so many times before.

When there was nothing left of Reginald Givens, Haid patted his shirt. Zipped up his jacket. Wiped sweat from his brow.

“This is my body, given up for you,” he said.

Chapter Three

The ones who give the pain come in many guises. I know this because I am one of them. I mutilated my right arm when I was fifteen --  seven slashes just below the elbow with a Lady Gillette -- simply to better understand the pain. Now I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. This damn tunnel that is my life.

Victor Anthony Tremulis walked out of the Hubbard Street adult bookstore, hands scrunched into the pockets of his Levi’s, the half-mast erection from the stroke palace up the block already fading. He had left the place just behind a bearded man in a wheelchair. There was something he could understand better than most: maybe a guy in a wheelchair could be sexually active. Tremulis didn’t hear the guy groaning in the booth next to him, even wondered how he could stick his dick into one of the slots in the dancer’s booth while sitting in the chair. Guy had legs, maybe he could walk.

One of the dancers’ booths had three holes so that she could give her blow jobs simultaneously. Didn’t anybody give a fuck about AIDS? What kind of physical pain would he go through if he caught HIV? He was hung up on physical pain because so many of the people in his life made him out for a mental case.

Thirty-three and wearing his forehead high these days, little yellow wisps falling onto his journal every time he bent down towards the blue-lined pages: Vic Tremble’s War Journal is what he called it.

He was at war with his thin-as-a-rail body, his folks, and the asshole commuters on the bus. Anybody who figured you were crippled only if you were stumbling along with a limp and had enough drool rolling down your shirt to get you a job as an extra in the next Romero zombie film. Sometime in the mid-seventies, he’d started experiencing chronic pain in his shoulders and arms. His father had decent insurance through the steelworker’s union, and he was sent on a merry jaunt through the doors of the Osteopathic Hospital of Illinois, Billings, Cook County, even saw some neurologist fuck who came to the conclusion that the pain was psychosomatic because he wasn’t drooling, or crumpled up like an empty pack of cigarettes. Cock-knocking pussies in their town cars.

In 1986, the Arthritis Foundation produced a pamphlet on myalgia, the destruction of the connecting tissues between muscles. By that time, everybody in his whole family assumed him to be just another troubled kid, inventing the pain for the attention it would get him. Dr. Basehart prescribed a mood drug called Elavil, the same kind of wonder drug that terminal cancer patients were given so that, well, they were in pain, but, hot damn, they were sure happy about it.

Give old Tremulis a couple of shots of Jack and give him the same effect.

He’d been thinking about a couple of bourbons at the Shelter, a flesh bar out over the river, after leaving the book store on Hubbard Street. He’d still do that, but he came across a magazine that gave him some incentive to write in his journal.

The store had various aisles, each devoted to the original sin of your preference -- guys and women fucking mailmen, lifeguards, landlords, neighbors, and the Marine Corps, in any variation. And animals. His favorite title was MY DACHSUND, MY LOVER. But the title of a magazine caught his eye. HUSKS. Photos of naked amputees and people wearing colostomy bags. He was fascinated and revulsed by it all. In one way, the pictures got his creative juices flowing and that was how he came to be writing in his notebook there on the corner of Hubbard and Franklin, in the dim light coming from a soup kitchen window.

* * *

I had burned my forearm as a baby (the journal entry continued), while attempting to play with an iron. Actually, the babysitter, a mousey girl named Charlene if I recall correctly, had plunged my arm up past my bony elbow and into a pot of scalding water she had placed on the kitchen floor. We lived in Wicker Park—the top floor of a three-flat on Honore—in the sixties. This was right before the big riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King, and so it was that a screaming baby, wailing that could be heard through closed windows in March, was still not uncommon.

My mother used to have coffee with her friends Flo and Cel at Sophie’s Busy Bee a few afternoons a week. The water incident was the only sadistic thing the sitter had ever done that had left a scar. She had told me that if I didn’t go along with the iron story then she would be telling my mother I accidentally fell behind the radiator in the living room and that was that. I tell everyone still that it was my stupidity with the iron that gave me the burn scar. Last I heard, Charlene was an RN at St. Luke’s-Presby.

The light at the end. I wonder if I truly have the nerve to step in front of—no, walk down the tracks of the Washington Street subway into the oncoming northbound train. Walk it nice and slow, see if I can make out the color of the conductor’s eyes as his face shoots into focus before impact. Would anybody in the cars die? I think not. Maybe that magazine would print a photo of my desiccated body there on the steel. Make me a posthumous centerfold.

The burn. Now to get back to it. I went into the basement while my father was asleep in front of the Bears/Packers game and my mother and her friends were out at the old Riverview amusement park. Maybe the crush of not being allowed to go with them—to ride the Bobs or get lost in Aladdin’s Castle—added to my despondency.

My need for another experiment.

Standing in the shadows of my father’s basement workbench, I recalled my bandages being taken off the scar in 1959, and how I sat with horrid patience in the living room as Dr. Schmidtke unwound the gauze bandages. If I recall correctly, I Was A Teenage Werewolf was on our old black-and-white RCA. Michael Landon getting turned on by a girl doing splits in the gym.

I bit the insides of my lip as some of the skin peeled off because the doctor had put Vaseline or something underneath the gauze, but I would not under any circumstances allow my parents to see me cry. It was the same when I prayed.

So I cut into my arm. This was 1968 now. It wasn’t like I was contemplating the old suicide shuffle. I cut into the triangular piece of pulp to see if that scar from long ago would bleed. That was all. It did bleed, but only a little; like droplets of vampire baby spittle. A couple of Band-Aids did the trick and I was upstairs before halftime. No one asked, but if they had, I would have told them that I had fallen while raking leaves.

But they didn’t notice. At least, they didn’t say anything. The razor scars are long gone now. It’s been nineteen years.

All my life I have tried to understand pain.

I don’t believe the same god gave us both Jonas Salk and Richard Speck, one to save countless lives with a polio vaccine, the other to knife eight nurses to death in their dorm. A small number of cooling bodies, to be sure. But not to the families. Only to the Hitlers and Khadafys, of which Our Lord Quote Unquote has provided us with many.

I tend to place my beliefs in gods I refer to as The Givers of Pain and Rapture. Lesser gods. I do not pray selfishly. I pray that those lesser gods use my body as a vessel so that I can dissipate pain throughout me.

I’ll never pray for my own sake.

The most excruciating pain I have ever caused myself was an incident that occurred just over a decade ago. I had been staying with a friend up on Sheridan and Cuyler. It happened in the bathroom. I just wanted to know how it would feel. Naked after a shower, still wet, my balls were shriveled.

I opened the wicker hamper opposite the sink and let my penis and testicles droop over the edge. I gently lowered the lid and applied pressure against the top with my hands. My pubic hair was stretched taut in places. Still pressing downward, I then proceeded to pull my dick through the tiny crack, keeping the lid as tightly closed as possible.

It was like clenching your teeth and pushing your tongue through the cracks. Your tongue looks bloodless and it was like that with my penis. I almost panicked when I thought about my sac splitting open and my nuts bouncing down to the bottom of the hamper onto my friend’s boxers. Explain that one.

The right testicle was bruised for several weeks. But at least I knew what it felt like. The Givers of Pain and Rapture would certainly understand. Perhaps one day I will be allowed to see the rapture.

I wonder what it would feel like to put a bone saw against my cheekbone? Would I be blinded by bone chips? Which would I feel most, the agony of sudden blindness or that of the saw cutting downward into my jaw?

Is it really any wonder that I will never pray for my own sake?

* * *

Tremulis closed the book and checked his watch. He’d picked himself up a job at the Hard Rock Cafe that past summer; sure, it was only washing the glasses and straightening chairs, but at least it sounded good when you said you worked in a club. And he liked guessing the kind of girl by her lipstick stains or cigarette stubs. Himself, he liked the kind of girl who didn’t rely on the crutches of makeup and or smoking. Not that he had so much as kissed somebody who was outside of his immediate family in the last year.

He came from a close-knit Polish family; Mother Tremulis’s parents coming from some obscure town in the Carpathian Mountains, moving first to Relling, Pennsylvania in the thirties, and on to Division Street— Polish Broadway—in 1947. Diedre - Tremulis did not like the idea of “Wiktor” working at a bar. She’d been a dice girl at the Orange Lantern on Wolcott, and often had stories of those days. Her only child couldn’t get her to understand that the corruptions were a bit different these days. And he was glad for the time it kept him away from home.

He backtracked east. The cafe was on the corner of Dearborn and Ontario, and he had about ten minutes to walk there.

Chapter Four

It hit him like a hammer in the gut. Gorshin had used to make wild, unexpected swings at him back at St. Vitus. The kid was small and there was no power to the punch. Yet Haid would double over and expel most every molecule of air inside him. It was like that now.

He had felt more than a little shaky after the incident back on Couch Street, like the adrenaline pump he’d experience after receiving cortisone shots in his back. Like his body was fighting new antibodies, something like that.

A hammer in the gut. He hurt so bad that he had stopped questioning Father on why he hadn’t explained to him that this was going to hurt so bad. This cleansing ritual, this act of contrition, whatever. For chrissakes, Father had never said it would hurt like this.

Stumbling, one foot over another. Someone who looked like he had run the good race. Only the street was deserted. The gangbangers and psychos never strayed this far east, and the clubbers still had a few hours to spritz their hair and primp in the mirror before fashionably showing up at the bars just as they were getting crowded. Even Washington Square Park was empty. Known as Bughouse Square to the natives, because of demonstrators in the park during the fifties, the tree-lined paths crossed each other just a block north of the apartment that was still in Uncle Vince’s name. Later, young and old men both would feel each other up on the green park benches. It was here that John Wayne Gacy met many of his victims in the late seventies, driving back to his house on Summerdale to give them the ultimate sex thrill.

So it was that no one saw him vomit on the sidewalk in front of Melone’s Baptist Ministry, within sight of his place. Long and hard projectile vomit, black and bloody. Shooting it out across Dearborn Street like his body was a lawn sprinkler.

What went wrong? Didn’t He say that it would be fine?

His body was rejecting the black street hustler. All there was to it.

But. . . why?

Haid fell to his knees, then to the ground—sudden as a kid with drop seizures—the dirt at the curb collected with the grey already in his hair. When he stood, carefully, his hair was a dust mop.

He wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his jacket. Bringing his arm in a curve to his face, Haid’s Book of Psalms tumbled from the inside pocket. It dropped into the puke. Bluish splotches peppered the edges of his sight.

He doubled over with the dry heaves once more before finally collapsing inside his front door, the kitchen tile cool to his face.

As it was in the days when he hanged with Cassady and Barre over at Massie’s, he felt thoroughly shit-faced. The obsessive-compulsiveness kicking in, Haid held his breath, head cocked to the only other room in the apartment. He didn’t want to wake Father. Then he remembered that Father lived within him now, He rested on the cool kitchen floor.

The relief was shortcoming; no sooner had he relaxed then his bowels loosened. He hurried to the small bathroom, hideously pasteled and cheerful, pounding the light switch on as he again fell, this time towards the bowl. Portrait of the man: pants around his ankles, his ten-yard stare just above the yellow-brown crap stains that bulls-eyed his BVDs.

His defecation was long and constant.

It was his cross to bear.

* * *

Haid had fallen asleep on the shitter, head tilting to the left the way a commuter’s on the El did. He dreamed that Father had an explanation for him.

The night of September 27th. The nurses and the doctor attempted to shock his heart back to life, but he was dead. Haid knows this with all his heart. But he cannot cry.

On the television screen, right there in the post-trauma wing at Henrotin, the TV that Vince Janssen was watching when he coded out, was the premiere of a cop show, set in 1963 Chicago. The prowl cars were Mercurys, the skyline in the credits was washed in cloudless blue.

In the dream, as in real life, Haid has listened to a theme song by Del Shannon: Watching all the planes go by, some live and others die, well I wonder...

Others die. Others die. Others die.

He realized what had to be done. Thy will be done, the man in the holy fire had whispered in his ear. Had demonstrated the healing power that lay dormant in Haid. Until the day of September 27th, 1988. The Year of Our Lord.

Son must heal Father.

Jesus wept.

He could save his god.

The dream shifts.

If he was doing what Father wanted, why had he gotten sick after leaving Couch Street? Why?

The dream flutters back...

Haid rushed to the window overlooking Oak Street and stared up at a sky that murdered the stars long ago. And in that polluted sky he sees the blackness of the monte dealer’s face, filled with false twinkle.

He heard the shump shump of the machine, EKG, EMG, whatever its initials, his Uncle Vincent had coded again. The machine failed and suddenly Haid smelled charred flesh and burnt chest hairs. He screamed silently into his face of the reflection in the window. He pounds his fists into the concrete sill again and again.

The hustler’s face whispers to him, coming close over the treetops. The false twinkle has become a conspiratorial wink. The hustler told him that with healing must first come pain... Haid understood. He did.

He understands after he has broken his second finger and has felt the pain, the wondrous, joyous pain and he knew then that yes, his Father, his god, will live. Because of him, He will live.

But he wanted to be certain. He broke his other hand and scrapes his nails hard against the tiled wall until it chips and splinters are driven through his fingernails and into the hand’s top-most knuckle joints.

When he begins an undulating scraping of his skull on the sill, the cement surface bloodied and pocked, a nurse comes forward, and grabs him, holding his palsied hands to his side.

Haid screams along with Del Shannon: Some live and others die, well I wonder. Haid screams I can hear the television bleeding -- Why Why Why Why Why... Puking up bits of his rib cage and crying through the rapture of it all, he saw two nurses giving the high five, one holding a soiled Fleet enema bag, laughing as she inadvertently smeared the shit of the still living man on the other’s palm and Del Shannon stops singing so a Maybelline commercial can be told, both nurses laughed and the doctors clapped each other on the back.

Haid looked up at the television and saw the healthy spikes of the EKG machine.

Beyond that, the night winked at him.

* * *

Levelle Thigpen was overweight, sure. He weighed in at fifteen pounds twenty-six years ago and never stopped gaining. Only, everyone called him Chubby Love because of his taste in women. He’d spot a big-boned gal and nudge Mike Surfer or Glowworm Willie, tell them hey, I’s goin’ to get me some chubby lovin’ tonight. Like that.

Chubby also scavenged for things, when he wasn’t clowning for the crowd. After the McDonald’s on Randolph closed down at eight, Chubby Love had all of three dollars and twelve cents, all in change, jangling at the bottom of his 7-11 Big Gulp go-cup. He figured on a little scavenger hunting on his way back to the St. Benedictine Flats.

Entering the cobblestone walkway of Couch Street, flanked on either side by green and grey garbage cans, he started his scavenging at the first can in sight. He saw a black briefcase propped against one of the smaller bins. Bending towards it, a mean feat in itself, as Thigpen’s lower abdomen looked as if Chubby was hiding an inner tube under his shorts, he saw a three-piece urinating against the wail, both hands pasted to the wall. Chubby thought that the guy looked as if he was being frisked by The Invisible Man.

“Thought they had port-a-pots in the limosines that be taking you threads home.” He couldn’t pass up commenting on the one thing he rarely did in public.

“Get away from that,” the threads talking about his case.

“Just walkin’ by, is all. Take a chill pill, brother mine.”

“I’m not your brother.” But Chubby was no longer listening, because his attention was diverted towards the deserted wheelchair farther down the alley.

For a street person, a wheelchair was almost as good as a shopping cart when it came to carrying one’s life belongings.

Chubby heard the guy zipping up behind him; he was more concerned with that beautiful looking chair. He could set his go-cup between his legs when he sat in it, and keep his Woolworth’s bags on the seat when he was walking.

The Lake Street El roared by, always louder and more mournful in the winter months. The wheelchair was damn near spotless. A Chicago Cubs backpack was slung over the back of the handlebars. An index card, covered by clear plastic, the kind you buy in dime stores, read THIS CHAIR IS REGGIE GIVENS. Chubby knew that name from somewhere, maybe a friend of a friend. It was easy enough to pull the lamination off; whoever Reggie was, the chair was Chubby’s now.

He plopped himself into the chair, the adequate overhead light telling him that it wouldn’t be all that tight a squeeze. Hell, he could breathe, and the fact that his thighs were glued to the arms like Dentu-Grip to false teeth meant that he needn’t worry about buckling up.

Something was sticking to his right foot. Gum, maybe. He hoped that the guy in the suit hadn’t pissed him. He looked down, picking up his right foot best he could.

There was a single playing card on the footrest. A red queen, folded in the corner.

Chubby tossed it to the rats and wheeled back to the street.

* * *

Haid woke up to find himself feeling much better. He also found himself still on the pot.

Dr. Broonioge often had told him that dreams were symbolic. He had learned quite a bit from this last dream. With the rapture must first come the pain. And with Father’s hand guiding him, he would learn to heal without getting sick. Father had told him that the only way to do that would be to find more willing souls.

Tomorrow, he would search for the black-haired man that he saw wheeling away from the strip joint.

Chapter Five

“Anybody see Reg, yet?” Colin Nutman looked up from the registration information desk. “His rent’s coming up due, and I see from his box that he hasn’t picked up his mail in at least two days.”

“You know how he be,” Mike Surfer said with a gravelly voice. Even with two fingers pressed up against his shunt, some days his words came out in a way that made Nutman think of gargling marbles.

“Yea,” Glowworm Willie echoed from behind a pool table with shortened legs. “He stay out sometimes three, four days. Just when you think he be disappeared into the earif, he come poppin’ back in.”

Surfer rolled over to one of the lobby’s three color televisions. Two other Marclinn residents, a bearded writer named Etch, because of how he always scribbled notes on a pad of paper tied to his walker, and Wilma Jerrickson, a grey-haired, tiny woman that most everyone called Grandmother.

“If either of you see him...” Colin called in Surfer’s direction.

“I’ll tell him,” Surfer said, over his shoulder.

“Me, too.” Willie said, as he racked up the pool balls, hoping for a partner.

Etch and Grandmother were intent on watching an episode of Cheers and so offered no response at all.

* * *

Vic Tremble’s War Journal:

11/15/88—Time, see what’s become of me, the song went. Paul Simon was right. It is a hazy shade of winter. Ask my fucking body. Christ on a fucking dogwood it hurts. I used to laugh at the tin man when he pled with Dorothy for the oil can. That’s how my motherless shoulders feel now, like they are a solid strip of metal and just why the fuck do I try to move them anymore in the first place?

Nobility? At what? Who am I trying to impress?

Walking past the Midland Building on Adams I saw a policeman directing traffic in the shadows of the Board of Trade. Probably got caught with his hands in the graft cookie jar and got put on detail for a few months.

I envy cops. I’d love to be healthy enough to wear the uniform, the badge. Not as a glory hound. Never that. I guess it’s because the cops operate on the street level, and that is where I am at my best. Where I blend in the easiest. If I lived on the street, I would finally be able to live with myself.

I put Mineral Ice on my back. Doesn’t smell like Ben-Gay. Couple weeks ago, this Hispanic guy sniffs the air like somebody stuck a dog turd under his Duncan Rinaldo pencil-moustache. He said to me, buddy, joo smell bad, joo know joo stink dat way?

I wished I could’ve drooled over his work shirt, the cock-knocker.

More than cops, I envy the men in their wheelchairs on the street corners. Guys like John and Slappy, I’ll give them a quarter if I have it. Because they are honest about their handicaps, and even the most dimwitted of mooks in the lunch hour crowds would understand their pain.

I wonder if people like Laurie Dann, who killed a kid in a Winnetka preschool in May, or this guy the newspapers call The American Dream, he runs around with a heating pad for a cape and stops people from littering—do people like this do the bad or do the good because their lives are filled with chronic pain and they only have one kind of release?

My journals are my release. Fate is cruel.

* * *

“I don’t know why Mom Winona wouldn’t let me put on Crime Story last night,” Wally Grogan was saying as he walked with Eddy Diedzek past the Baptist church on Clark Street. “I mean, so Torello’s always shooting people! I know it’s not real, Jeez Louise! Except for the parts where Luca hits a lady.”

“Maybe she won’t let you watch ‘cause she thinks you’re a little peenie-boy,” Eddy returned, ready to fend off his friend’s blows.

“No, you dork.” The two ten-year-olds stopped to wave hello to the Rev. Marvin, the pastor of the church. Mom Winona said it was always a good idea to talk to men of the church, unless they were sidewalk preachers. Marvin Melone—his full name was hand-painted on the sign above the door—gave out the best candy at Halloween; the boys would say hello to him every day for that reason alone.

“Stay bundled up, boys!” The reverend admonished, as he walked up the front steps. “Even though you’ve only got another block, it only takes a second to get sick!”

“Yessir.” Both boys made a show of pulling their red scarves closer around their collars when they passed the church.

“Hey, let’s do that song we learned at school,” Eddy suggested.

“Which song?”

“You know, ‘Skokie’s Got Rhythm’.”

“You start.” Wally kicked a rusted can from the sidewalk to the street.

“Skokie’s got rhythm, rhythm all over, boom, check it out, boom boom, check it out,” Eddy did a kiddie version bump-and-grind. The song they sung in class was done round robin style, with Skokie being substituted with each classmate’s name. “Wally’s got rhythm.”

Just then, Eddy stepped onto a square of sidewalk that had the cement company’s name on it. Wally caught it.

“STINKFISH!” He bellowed, startling Eddy into looking down to see the box that read YURKES AND SONS, 1965. And the pile of frozen vomit beside it.

Wally, capering with his shadow, bumped into Eddy.

Chapter Six

“The hell, you say!” Frank Haid had given the matter some thought and decided to confront the man with honesty and sincerity. Robert Dolezal was going for none of it. ”What, you think I’ve got a deuce on me? Gonna roll me, are you?”

Haid had waited in the grey-white mist that was Chicago twilight for three separate nights that week. He couldn’t ask the strip joint owner about the suffering man; on the street, everybody looked out for the other guy. It wasn’t like this years ago. Father had told him that, once upon a time, when all the Old Style signs read ZIMNE PIWO and you could fall asleep on the El and actually wake up to tell the story, once upon a faraway time, you had as much on the guy next door as he had on you.

Haid didn’t have much to offer anybody, let alone the next guy. So he offered the black-bearded man in the chair honesty.

He had stayed a good distance behind the man, not wanting to draw attention. North Clark Street was no longer the Skid Row that it was during the seventies, but it was still deserted. Only diehards for the sexually perverse came down to the leather shops or to see the female impersonators at The Baton.

The man wheeled north to Ontario, then turned toward the lakefront. The guy had perseverance, that was for sure. And Haid was right about the guy being a vet; he had an olive-on-white sticker on the back of the chair’s headrest. MEKONG RIVER YACHT CLUB. Certainly he’d seen enough of all this world could show him. Had shown him.

“I have the power to heal you,” Haid said, having no intention of giving up. He had kept pace with the vet nine blocks, the cold digging into his bones like cancer. Finally making his move at the corner of Ohio and Wabash, in the neon wash of the Cass Hotel, Haid felt certain that the flophouse was where the guy lived.

“What, and take me to heaven?” The man smirked and the sound was that of a smoker’s hack. “I been to heaven and they stuck me back down here in Hell. So, go on. I ain’t got no money, but you’re welcome to take my food stamps if you have to, man.”

“What are you talking about?” Haid was baffled: Did he... ?

“Do you think that I’m here to rob you?”

“Man’s gotta do what he’s gotta do,” the vet said. “I killed a lot of innocent people when I was in-country, so...”

Both men stopped talking to watch the street corner’s only other sign of life: a Yellow cab sped to the south and careened around the Medina Temple.

“I’m not here to judge you,”Haid took a chance to move closer. Though the man’s size could be disproportionate because of the chair, he still seemed muscular enough to grab Haid and squeeze the shit out of him.

“That what they’re calling robbery these days? Sorry, I musta been sleeping when they put out the revised edition of Modern Slang and Euphemisms.”

“It’s what Father calls it.” The man’s denial so flustered Haid that he forgot about his book of psalms. He regained most of his composure by taking on his childhood persona. Bully. Intimidator.

Holy terror.

“Oh, I’ll save you, all right.” Haid said through clenched teeth.

He reached down swiftly, plunging his fist up against the vet’s chest. The man’s eyes bulged. Haid’s fist simmered and glowed, his thumb and fingers sinking through the layers of clothing first, and layers of skin second.

Haid clamped his other hand down over the crippled man’s mouth, to keep him from screaming. There was no telling about someone who had so little faith in God.

In a few seconds, both hands had disappeared into the sitting man’s body, and Haid was able to lift the entire body like a marionette and draw it to his own chest. The sizzling and the glowing started anew.

* * *

Several pieces of the body had fallen to the ground, but Haid was afraid to stay around and look for them. Father was prodding him to move on.

He didn’t notice the lake wind anymore, because his chest and arms were warm and tingling. The vet is reveling in his entrance to Heaven.

He walked over to State to catch a Chicago Avenue bus, hoping the route was 24 hour Owl Service. The healing process had taken much longer this time. Through the grates in the sidewalk, he could hear the coming of the State Street subway, running endlessly beneath an elevated hell.

Chapter Seven

“So here I am, I’m thinking,” Dean Conover glanced over at Aaron Mather, who was driving the unit tonight. “Like, why the hell is Division crawling up our asses over the bulletproof vests again? Three cops dusted this year, and because that last one, Doyle out of Wentworth, he only gets it once in the chest. Ba-bing! Time to talk about the vests again...”

He shook his head in disgust. Neither cop had to mention that Willett and Selfridge, partners out of Grand Crossing on the Far Southside, were shot in the head. Every Chicago cop had mixed emotions about the Kevlar vests. Aside from being uncomfortable in any season, constant wear caused the velcro straps to curl and not hold. Any subsequent vests had to be purchased by the individual cop.

The ultimate logic of the overall effectiveness of the vest was this: every gangbanger and street psycho, by the Chicago evolutionary scale, had long since learned to shoot for the head and/or armpit. And parents marveled when their sons and daughters figured out The Legend Of Zelda on the home Nintendo.

“And remember that detective out of Area 1, I forget his name, hit the S-curve on the Drive during a narcotics chase?” Mather had only been on the force for seven years, and knew as much about what went down in every alley as his partner. Every alley between Goose Island and Seneca Park.

“Right,” Conover hadn’t thought of that one. “A damn vest sure as hell isn’t going to keep you from dropping to the bottom of Lake Michigan!”

The blond cop, a ten-year veteran, turned south of Wabash. The call had come over the radio for their unit, 1844, to answer a possible assaultin-progress outside of the Cass Hotel. They could see the dull pink neon in the distance.

“Sure enough, the ‘C’ is burned out.” Mather gave a cursory nod to the right.

“Maybe it’s a subliminal thing to keep the straights out.”

“Yea, sure thing, Dean.”

“I’m selling the Orleans Street Bridge, too, did you know that?” While they talked, Conover’s ice-blue stare never left the street. Some of the people at the 18th District, blues and perps alike, swore that Conover never blinked, that his eyes simply narrowed to slits.

It turned out that it wasn’t the night desk at the Cass that had called 911, but a bartender at Murdy’s -- a bar of mixed clientele next door. A short alley ran between the two four-story brick buildings. A tall, blond man came out of the bar; the squadrol’s cherry flashed blue and red across his face.

“I’m the bartender, Mick Desmond.” When the cops didn’t respond, he swallowed. Both Conover and Mather had already noticed that there seemed to be no sign of an assault, and the bar was so quiet, there wasn’t any brawl going down in there, unless the bar catered to mimes.

“I know it’s awful quiet out here; guess I should of told the operator it was in the alley here.” He pointed over his right shoulder at an angle of darkness. Mather took a step in that direction; Conover took a moment to size up Desmond. He made six feet easy, hair that looked bottle blond hung shoulder-length and curled around ears that resembled mutant cantaloupes. Dressed in black slicks and a T-shirt that depicted a “Lounge Lizard,” he didn’t look too … weird. Conover wondered why the hell he was gay. Had to be the funky ears.

“See, I was out the service door, dumping empty boxes of Perrier. I heard voices, glanced up front and saw them in the light of the hotel.”

“Them? You knew these...?”

“No, no, I didn’t mean it like that, no.” The bartender folded his arms over his chest. “I meant that, well, there was one guy threatening this other guy in a wheelchair, and...”

“Wait,” Conover interrupted. Mather was approaching the lip of the alley. “Maybe the guy was pissed because the guy in the chair was a dead beat.”

“Oh, no, you got that wrong. Respectfully, the guy in the chair lived at the Cass. He wasn’t a bum, no.”

“Yea, yea. Go on.” Shit, he thought. No gunshots, this guy’s long gone. With one guy in a chair, we know it wasn’t a lover’s quarrel. He whipped out a black Mead notebook to take a few notes, for the sake of keeping the force looking competent. He motioned for Desmond to keep talking.

“I didn’t see that he had a knife, it was just like he was threatening the crippled guy. I think his name was Dole, Dolby, something...”

Conover had already effectively tuned the guy out. He concentrated on his pencilled notes:

15 Nov, 88 11:07PM. Resp. to report of poss. assault., 642 N. Wabash. Spoke w. Mick Desmond, bartender at same ad.

“The guy standing looked more like your partner. I mean he had darker hair, maybe a little white, kind of a husky voice.”

“That all you can give me, Des?”

“Hey, I had to get back inside, man! Murdy’s out on a shoot in Milwaukee, but that don’t mean one of his spies isn’t around!”

Ben Murdy was a local celebrity who had made dozens of commercials in the last ten years; some, for Lite beer and Church’s Fried Chicken, were national. He ran three bars in the city and knew quite a bit about the human flotsam that drifted by his establishments. Mather had read several articles on Murdy in the Trib and in an alternative weekly, The Reader. He was on location at the Milwaukee Penal Institute in Wauwatosa doing a pilot for the Fox network.

Mather was about to go back to the squad when he heard something down the alley. Probably a rat, but still. He drew his piece and stepped forward cautiously. Conover followed, a beat behind.

Later, Mather would tell Area 5 Homicide that he didn’t know why serial killer surfaced in his brain. Two dead logs in the stream of Mather’s involvement in two “thrill killer” cases. He’d put in several hundred man hours on the Dennis Cassady “Rapid Transit” murders in the fall of ‘85 and nearly the same amount on the Tylenol-cyanide murders in June of ‘82. The latter still unsolved.

He would also tell the dicks that the smell of the charred flesh took him totally unawares. He’d thought that the Cassady murders were brutal, but....

Calling for his partner to come closer, Mather took a step forward and saw the silhouette of a large, spoked wheel.

“I heard the bartender saying that the guy in the wheelchair lived in the hotel.”

“Uh-huh.” Conover had closed the gap between them.

“Did he say he saw the guy go back into the hotel?”

“Not that he could tell, he was moaning about his boss catching him loafing. Get this, the guy’s doing a pilot for a bunch of gays at Stateville, they’re calling it ‘A Romeo in Joliet.’ And...”

Mather had pulled his flashlight several steps back and now flashed it on the wheel.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” he said in a breathless whisper when he saw the dead man, and what little remained of him.

* * *

It surprised Mather that the body had been identified so quickly. He hadn’t expected what was left to be IDed at all. He had bet Conover he’d spring for the full tab—cover, drinks, all of it—when Koko Taylor played at Kingston Mines later that month. Conover went for it, saying on how they identified floaters pulled from the river in Stokes baskets with their faces and prints eroded by time, so, sure the corpse was going to be identified. He reminded Mather that Cleveland police had positive I.D.’ed two of the Torso Murderer’s victims. To which, Mather added that Cleveland Police still had eleven unidentified torso cases in their files, plus the torsos in Youngstown and Toledo during that same same period of the thirties.

It looked at first that Mather might win the bet. An hour after the two uniforms had shown up at the scene, a dozen gapers stood beyond the yellow banners that were familiar to those who watched the nightly news in Chicago. The beat officers from Unit 1823 kept the crowd at bay.

Conover and Mather had been joined in the breezeway by Det. Lt. Jake Daves of Area 3 Violent Crimes, a police photographer, a reporter for UPI, Shaün McCoppin, who happened to be grabbing a drink at Murdy’s, and assistant M.E. Frank Bervid. The junior medical examiner had arrived last, while the cops were standing around the corpse at different angles, speculating on the instrument of death.

Conover suggested a blowtorch had done the job. McCoppin offered that it might have been a hatchet; but Lt. Daves still wouldn’t allow him copies of the Crime Scene shots. The remains consisted of a torso, a right forearm, and both legs from the knees down. Unless Desmond was juiced when he called 911, this was the guy from the Cass. The wheelchair, an old Everett-Jennings, lay on its side, between the cops and the corpse. Nothing could be touched until Forensics dusted, and the unit had yet to show.

The man had been wearing a grey sweatshirt and jeans. The clothes had been partially burned. This was what made Conover think it was a blowtorch and not a hatchet. What scared all of the men was the fact that the position of the legs seemed to suggest that they, along with the torso, had rested in the chair before it tipped over.

That whoever killed the man had done it while he was helpless in his chair. A very grim thought.

After Bervid had pulled up in his Chevrolet Impala, with vanity plates that read AWTOP C, he took one look at what lay on the ground, pronounced him dead, and told everyone he was going back home to watch Insomniac Theater on Channel 7. No way he was going to be able to sleep without dreaming about what lay before them.

The Crime Scene Unit dusted the chair, dumpster, and the surrounding concrete. A triangular path was chalked around the corpse and wheelchair.

Mather and Conover stood over a steam vent, thawing out. What had struck the blond cop privately was the dead man’s collarbones. At the point where the dismemberment had been fused over, the collarbone poked through the reddish black skin. Conover had once dated a girl from Louisville, Kentucky. She had sent him into multiple paroxysms by licking the insides of his collarbones. Years ago, a world away. A time when he lived for nothing more than hanging out at the Vogue Theater every night.

The corpse’s partly exposed collarbones looked like bleached chicken drumsticks.

Lt. Daves talked with the man from UPI. The photographer and the techies packed it in. The meat wagon pulled up and the remains were bagged, to be taken to Cook County Morgue where he tentatively became John Doe #47-88.

Chapter Eight

Recalling the sticker from Nam adhering to the back of the victim’s wheelchair, Lt. Daves expected that the latents drawn from the chair would come through the military database. This was not to be the case, but when they put the prints through the Illinois Offender database, the following came out:

LATENT SEARCH REQ ILL OFF TIE-IN DIRK FED BLD

Robert Hodge Dolezal AKA HODGE AKA COUNTRY...Male Cauc DOB 4-11-47 Camden NJ...LKA Hotel Waldrop, 12 South Halsted...Priors: ‘74 week in County, misdemeanor...’79-’81 Joliet Correctional, assault with intent, crowbar weapon, dispute over drinks at After Hours, 112 West Van Buren. ‘84 six months prob false representation. Parole officer, Isadore Eugene...

First, the detective said “Bingo.” Second, he cursed the fact that information logged into the database was rarely updated by the same person, and had no real sense of continuity when it came to which, if any, of the entries had “background” to the situation that might prove useful. Like the network for missing children.

The Illinois combase was a headache and heartache for any Chicago detective. Even those who didn’t know how to work a computer. And there were many who didn’t.

Daves half expected the head to show up in a waste container along the State Street Mall, a prize won by a bag lady’s grappling hook hand.

He had said to the reporter, who would want to dismember a cripple? The wire services would pick up the line and an enterprising Rupert Murdoch type at the Sun-Times would coin the term “Painkiller.”

The detective stood alone, his partner having gone into Murdy’s for a drink. Daves had been involved in the Andriot/Dolenz spree, the Gecht/Korkaralis ripper murders where the killers ate their victims’ severed breasts. He’d handled gang bangers and gay bashers, sixteen-year olds who fucked a med student while smashing a concrete block onto her head during their climaxes, and just last week there was a crack addict on Willard Court who had jammed her crack-addicted baby head first between the hot water heater and the roach-infested wall because she didn’t want to share her fix.

But this...

He made a mental note to have Forensics check for acid on the chair.

The El rumbled by like distant thunder under State Street. Somewhere on the platform below, a saxophone player blew out how notes to “The Lover’s Concerto” again and again.

* * *

The newspapers handled the dismemberment murder on Wabash Avenue each in their own way. The conservative Tribune ran the story in 26 point Century Bold Roman on the first page of the Chicagoland section the next morning:

Grisly killing near Hancock has police stymied

The Sun-Times, still as sensationalistic as the New York Post even though Rupert Murdoch had sold the paper eighteen months before to start the Fox television network, devoted the entire front page to the murder:

VAGRANT DISMEMBERED

NEAR GOLD COAST

Much the same way a reporter coined the phrase “flying saucer” after interviewing Kenneth Arnold regarding the disks he saw over Mount Rainier in June of 1947, Sun-Times reporter Nora Chvatal rephrased a comment by Det. Lt. Jake Daves of Harrison District Violent Crimes as “Does Chicago have a Pain Killer stalking its streets?” The article was continued inside the tabloid-size paper, a note at the bottom of page one read See DISMEMBER, pg. 7.

PHASES, an alternative weekly newspaper catering for the most part to the clubs scene on the north side, somehow came into possession of an on the scene photograph, and the editor ran it above the fold on the November 18th issue, borrowing from the Sun-Times in the process.

In blinding white Baskerville type over a stark scene of blacks and greys, the story was told:

PAINKILLER:

Chicago’s got a live one again.

The Tribune did not pick up on the catchphrase until the next known disappearance, five days later. Someone at the news desk evidently knew that the papers in Gotham sold better when David Berkowitz was referred to as Son of Sam as opposed to the dull-sounding .44 Killer.

* * *

Painkiller didn’t sound like there was a psycho out there in the streets. As with moon-faced Berkowitz, or even Jack the Ripper a century ago, the public was mystified and curious at a name like that. Painkiller. A few people were even known to let the word roll off their tongue, see how it sounded aloud.

Chapter Nine

The words and the pictures and the cold city reality were digested by many that day after the first known murder.

Victor Tremulis took time out from writing in his journal about what it would feel like if he first masturbated, then slit his wrist, and then drained his blood into the recently emptied shaft, and read what the indifferent print writers and editors had to say about the killer. Or, as Tremulis thought of him, the new kid on the butcher’s block.

He sat in front of the Wendy’s on Quincy Court, letting the Sports and Business pages scatter like scared pests in the November wind as he concentrated on the story, fascinated.

He was as curious about murder as he was mutilation.

* * *

Mike Surfer and Wilma Jerrickson sat near the back of the Marclinn lobby because Mike was involved in one of the three-times-a-day cleaning of his neck shunt.

The Impact brand portable aspirator box lay on the man’s lap, and at this point, Surfer was doing no more than fiddling with the contents, doing a mock inventory. At times like these, Wilma Jerrickson, known as Grandmother or Gramma to most of the Marclinn’s residents and visitors, thought that Mike Surfer acted like a stubborn child who did not want to clean his room.

When he had tired of fiddling with the plastic-wrapped aspirator tubing, Mike brought up the subject of the man in the wheelchair killed up by the Cass Hotel. The story in the Sun-Times had said the man’s name was Robert Dolezal. Surfer usually read The Defender, Chicago’s black daily, but the somewhat propagandist, even to blacks, tabloid ignored the Wabash Avenue killing in favor of a front page tirade against President-elect Bush. But if the victim had been black...

Mike Surfer avoided thinking that Reggie Givens hadn’t been back to the Marclinn in a few days. He told himself upon waking that morning, before seeing the newspaper, that he would wheel on up to the Hard Times tavern later.

“Somepin about that man getting hisseif kilt in that chair.” Wilma knew that Surfer started most of his conversations with a simple statement.

“It is hard to believe the detail the papers will have in this day and age,” she said, pushing at the aspirator with a bent finger, prodding Surfer into getting the cleaning over with.

“I stopped watching the news, on the television, you know.”

“I know, Gramma.”

Wilma, who had for all true purposes except for the mail system had given up her last name in the late seventies, was a white seventy-five year old with hair the color of the haze you sometimes see around a winter’s moon. She had never told anyone, confided in anyone, why she was confined to a wheelchair. She was one of only two women currently living at the Marclinn. Katrina “call me Cat” Townsend was also white and about twenty years Wilma’s junior. Cat still wore black toreador pants most every day of the week, her white (with a milky transparency) shin braces clamped over them just below the knees.

“Sad thing when anybody dies,” she said, looking down at the glass on the table beside them -- a twelve-ounce tumbler with Walter Payton grinning on the front. The back of the glass listed ten achievements or records that the running back had set while on the Chicago Bears.

She took a sip of the ginand tonic—her “eye opener”—within, and the level of the drink dropped to 4. Most 100-yard games—77.

Mike Surfer looked up, perhaps still thinking about Givens.

“Never met the man, though it be say in the paper that he was some kinda crook once,” he said, absently running a heavily-calloused hand over the right wheel of his chair. His skin was almost a greyish-brown in the area below his little finger, from years of gripping the wheel. “I ax you though, Gramma, it not right for that to happen to a guy.”

The two could have been lovers on a park bench; Wilma’s’ chair nearly touching Surfer’s, the wheels turned slightly to accommodate the fact. There was a sticker of the Honky Tonk Man, a character in one of her beloved wrestling programs, on the arm of her chair. She had gotten the sticker from a box of Crispy Critters, which she still ate even though the wheaty animal crackers got caught in her dentures. Her son Herbert had loved the cereal as a kid on Monticello, back before the Puerto Ricans moved in.

“I think it would be quite simple for someone to come along and put a blowtorch to anyone of us!” The harshness of her words were not the by-product of her morning drink. “And clean out your windpipe now, young man!” She waved a hand at him as if he were a waiter who had brought food that was distasteful to her, table at The Drake.

Surfer uncapped the shunt, it popped free of his throat, and he plugged in the plastic tube to a cylinder in the box. He looked over at Wilma, hoping for gratification, and saw that her stare had gone blank. She was thinking about the bad things again.

In fact, Wilma Jerrickson’s mind was, at this moment, a rush of images. A whirlwind of defeat that she’d always seemed to stay several running steps ahead of. But she couldn’t run these days, these years. She hid in the shadow of pale hope here at the Marclinn, with visits to her nephew every month.

Surfer, and the others—Etch, Karl, Willie, Slappy—all of them, even Cat, kept her from thinking about a son none of them knew about, a son stabbed in the neck on the Ravenswood El in 1974. From years of bed sores and food that always tasted of Dentu-Grip and Feen-A-Mint laxative, from sick minds and sick hearts and really very little love at all. No love at all except for the kinship of those like her at the Rainey Marclinn Home for the Physically Disabled.

Actually, those almost like her. For, the reason she had self-exiled herself into confinement in this wheelchair since 1974 was frightening in its simplicity; a clinical reason, though one not having anything to do with disease.

By staying in the wheelchair, bundled up in her bright red and orange afghan, it became that much harder to string up a noose and hang herself from whatever light fixture was handy. Balance the photo albums under her feet, kick them away, and follow them into the dervish oblivion.

She was out of it, back to the present. It was that quick with her. Mood swings a manic-depressive would kill for.

“I’m serious, Michael. I know I couldn’t get my poor hands to wheel me away from the flame!” Would she really try? She held her hand to her breast, as if she had just been offered sex. .

Surfer had run the aspirator tube through the slit in his throat a dozen times, like the ultimate in flossing. He popped the shunt back into place, keeping his finger over it like it was the trigger on a squirt gun or something equally non-threatening.

“Sad world.” His mouth a minimalist charcoal sketch. The words less garbled after the aspirator cleaning. “I want to be with you when you go sunnin’, this be keepin’ up.”

Wilma dismissed it with a wave. “Don’t be silly, Michael, the farthest I go is in front of the Theater, you know that.” She was referring to the recently renovated Chicago Theater. At the northeast corner of State and Lake, it was within sight of the Marclinn.

“But still.” Michael tried to sound desperate about it.

“Michael, I sit out there, you can see me around more people going by after work than I could ever meet in my life!” She said she never had to go all the way to the beach, because the waters of Lake Michigan had the same smell as came from out of tile subway grates along Washington Street. Dank, but yet somehow fresh, the year round. She had told this to Karl, an aging biker who had ALS. His reply was the same he gave most anything: Fuckin’ A. That is, right on the money.

“Michael, you are a gentleman and a scholar.” She drank the last of her morning constitutional. You could read now how Payton had run 16,726 yards in his career. 9.5 miles.

“Now it’s time for this old gal to get her butt into gear. I told Colin I’d watch the Lotto machine this morning, and I promised Cat that I would help her go through the Sears catalog this afternoon.”

“I read that cop book you gave me,” he said, to keep her near him just a few heartbeats longer. “The one by that Ed McBain guy.” He pronounced the last name Mac Bain.

“Oh, which one was it now? I forget, there are so many...”

“Tricks it was. With them little people on Hall’ween dressed as boogens an’ haints, robbin’ groceries.”

Wilma had started to wheel away, but her face brightened and she placed a hand on Surfer’s knee. “You know, my nephew Henry is going to give me a copy of the new one for Christmas. Lullaby, I think it’s called.”

“That’s a nice title,” Surfer said. “Like that old song, ‘Lullaby and Good night.’ Just be careful, Gramma! I want to read that one, too.” He had tried saying that last part without fingering his shunt. “I said on how I just wants you to be careful!”

“Hell, Michael. If you aren’t watching over me, then Evan is when he’s all dressed up as that American Dream character!” Wilma slapped him on the hand one last time.

As an afterthought, she reached over, one hand clutching the afghan to her throat, and kissed Surfer on his stubbly cheek. His complexion being dark chocolate, she couldn’t tell if he was blushing as she wheeled away.

A few feet away from Surfer stood a pool table, and in the short silence following Wilma Jerrickson’s departure, someone broke and a new game of Stripes and Solids was begun. On the television above the pool table, an advertisement for a new aspirin product played out its pitch. Yuppies worked hard and held their temples briefly to the jingle, “I haven’t got time for the pain... “.

* * *

Frank Haid read the article in the Tribune about the murder. His interest waned before the third paragraph. He was never big on reading, or watching the news, for that matter.

In the candlelit bedroom, the shadows of crucifixes like beckoning fingers across the wall above his Father’s corpse, still in the wheelchair, Haid went to bed after twice reading Gary Larson’s Far Side cartoon, unable to understand it.

Chapter Ten

Victor Tremulis’ first visit to a church downtown came on a day which typified Chicago weather of any given season.

Thursday had started out looking damn fine for being so close to the holidays. Later, Victor would think that he was not the only one gulled by the bitch-goddess weather. Morning broke at seven-twenty, a blue the color and as crisp as a rookie policeman’s shirt. A blue so pale that it was almost, well, Victor wrote in his journal on the way to the Loop that it was as if the clouds were stretched out so thin that the blue couldn’t help but wash through. If the city natives weren’t too cautious, there would be dancing in the streets, he wrote.

By eleven, the most anyone grumbled underneath a featureless grey sky was, “at least it ain’t snowin’ anna wind ain’t comin’ off the lake.” Tremulis heard that, or variations of such, by three people on the same street. And not one single meteorological source would saddle the blame; by noon, when the first loveless flake fell without fanfare into the gutter beneath the Lake Street elevated tracks, every radio and television station was predicting every scenario a disaster movie mogul could dream up. Temperatures ranging from ten below in the outlying ‘burbs to forty and warming were to be expected, depending on which dial you might be flipping through.

When Victor Tremulis by chance walked past St. Sixtus, on Madison between LaSalle and Clark, it was thirty degrees and he was wearing his autumn windbreaker. The last time he had gone to a mass of any kind was for the Feast of Our Lady of Czestechowa, a Polish remembrance, in August. He attended mass occasionally at St. Boniface or St. John Cantius with his mother, because he truly loved her, deep down in his heart where the shit stink of the city couldn’t touch him.

And so it was, purely by chance, that he ended up in front of the Franciscan church, with its monolithic Christ on the cross looking down over cabbies and bike messengers giving each other and everybody in general the finger. He had come above ground from the Milwaukee/Douglas subway line in front of W. Bell on Dearborn. His stomach was acidic because of the pain doing the Bristol Stomp on his back. Seeing the turn the weather had taken since the train had gone underground back at Ashland didn’t help worth a cat’s shit.

The cramps hit him as he crossed the First National Plaza, recalling an argument with his mother over ten dollars. Why did she have to piss and moan so? “Why does everyone think I’m so violent?” He muttered loud enough for those closest to glance his way.

Just because I’m angry, he thought.

He rushed into the Wendy’s across from the plaza, hating how his bowels controlled his life. Afterwards, a fine sheen of sweat on his forehead, Tremulis walked past the Loop synagogue, turned down Madison and was mesmerized by the huge stone savior. The church had four separate entrances; a woman in a blue bonnet talked to herself in front of the westernmost set of stairs, a cigarette dangling from her mouth.

Tremulis stood there, watching.

“What a babe, huh?” Tremulis turned to see a man with shoulder-length brown hair. He was wearing a casual sport jacket and carried a maroon portfolio. Victor started to open his mouth.

“Just like you, you fucking freak,” the man interrupted him. “Can’t even walk a straight line. I been tryin’ to pass you, you fucking dork. Jesus Christ.”

So surprised by the man’s outburst that he couldn’t even react, Tremulis could only stare as the man passed near the breezeway between the church and the Brevoort Building. Suddenly, a black man in a wheelchair came out of the alleyway, his front tires seemingly skimming the air, and blocked the man’s path.

“Shoo, son. You got a mouth!” Tremulis saw the crippled man place a finger over a plastic thing on his throat, just visible underneath a grey and white scarf.

The punk in the sport jacket stared at the man who faced his chest head-on as if he were an apparition from a nicotine fit. Maybe he thought twice about it, but he then jabbed a middle finger up and almost touched the black man’s blue parka. Then he pushed past him, as well, shaking his head at the audacity of the public display.

The crippled man extended a calloused hand to Tremulis, again touching his throat as he spoke. “Name’s Mike. Mike Surfer.” Later, he would explain the nickname he had given himself.

“Hey, don’t go lettin’ that clown go jammin’ you up. Not the way, man.”

Tremulis looked down at the smiling face, the teeth a white rind in the stink of the lunch hour gutter.

Behind them, the bonnet woman lit another cigarette and cleared her throat to continue speaking nonsense.

* * *

They went into the church together, Tremulis feeling warm inside. The lobby had the smell all churches had, one he could almost, but not quite, place. Like parchment and spices, but that wasn’t it, exactly.

Alleluia, from beyond the next set of doors, up the marble steps. Alle-lu-ia-ia. A -le-e-lu-u-ia. Mike whispered to him how he had knocked over a votive candle once and set his sleeve on fire. Tremulis dipped his hand into the pool of holy water, and Surfer did the same. The black man reaching upward looked to Tremulis, like a child placing money on a counter top to buy licorice from the corner grocer.

Come and save us, Lord our God.

Let us see your face.

Let us see your face, and we shall be saved.

There was an elevator opposite the gift shop, and Tremulis was fascinated by this. When the doors opened and he saw a gilded cross several inches over the glass frame of the doors to the nave, he worried himself with the thought of his palsied hands banging the cross into the glass at the exact moment the congregation bowed their collective heads in prayer.

Lord, let us see your kindness.

And grant us your salvation.

The Lord will judge us by His law,

He is our King and Savior.

He was like that at home, afraid to make a move to disrupt anybody from their outline of normalcy. A mouse hiding from the talons of conformity wielded by his parents...

Raise your voice and tell the Good News.

The Lord our God comes in strength.

Let the clouds rain down the Just One,

And the earth bring forth a Savior.

An elderly woman clutching a red pill box was saying a prayer before each station of the cross, down the farthest aisle to the right of the two men. Her lips crumpled like old newspaper as she mouthed her blessings.

* * *

“...and the earth bring forth a Savior,” Haid finished the December First reading from the St. Joseph’s Weekday Missal. He had a captive audience of one, and the man was terrified. They were in an alleyway off Van Buren and Plymouth Court. The only lights outside of the alley street lamp came from the top floor library of the John Marshall Law School a half block north.

The man in the wheelchair, black and legless, had been drinking to fend off the cold. Moonlight, benign and deceitful, glinted briefly off an emptied bottle of Night Train Express in the man’s lap. The man himself was sobered by fear.

The day’s temperatures had dropped drastically. Loop workers, again displaying a hive intelligence, fled the winds barreling down the concrete canyons by way of the Metra and CTA commuter lines. The last of them had disappeared into the catacombs of Union Station by seven PM. When the weather in this city is displaying its fickleness in the middle of a work week, even the taverns are empty.

The wind had come in off of Lake Michigan in late afterndon, a Canadian wind, while Mike Surfer was introducing his new friend Vic to Gramma and Cat Townsend at the Marclinn. This type of wind usually overtook Illinois out in what Chicago weathermen call “the sticks.” The wind in the Loop that night hugged the elevated tracks, turned malicious circles amongst the lofts of Printer’s Row and the terraces of Dearborn Park, and eventually found its way to the alley where the Painkiller was embarking on the rapture.

The wind chill factor was minus eleven. The wind itself filled the hood of the Haid’s jacket and whipped it to either side of his head. Haid was not cold. The man in the chair, who had identified himself as Hutch an eternity of seconds ago, sat as far back in the chair as his numb butt would allow.

His gold teeth were chattering up a storm, but the weather was secondary to his condition. There just wasn’t anybody else out on the street to hear him scream. Hutchie knew that.

No one to smell the burning flesh, when that part of it happened, either.

Chapter Eleven

Officers Rizzi and Morisette responded to a “See the man” at a corner deli called The Dill Pickle, on Van Buren and Dearborn. They were beat patrolmen from the First District, and Morisette radioed in at six-forty AM that they were on their way. The wind had lulled but the elder cop still felt numbness in his fingers simply from fiddling with his walkie-talkie. Even with the woolen gloves on.

“The man” turned out to be a security guard working graveyard at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, a stone wedge of a prison on Congress Parkway. He was walking to State Street to catch his bus back to Hyde Park when he saw the empty wheelchair in the alley. And then saw the body parts lying amidst the frozen refuge. “I read the papers, you know,” the guard said as if no one would believe it from the looks of him. And here it was Rizzi had worked up an appetite and was looking forward to grabbing a bite at the deli.

“Green, are we?” Morisette came this close to cracking a grin.

“Like you’re the seasoned veteran...” Rizzi grinned back.

Truth be told, they’d seen worse. Back in ‘82, when Gecht and Korkoralis were (according to the defense lawyers: allegedly) slicing off prostitutes’ breasts and eating them during satanic rituals. They’d both been there when the last victim was found near Burnham Harbor. And Morisette was working mounted patrol in the forest preserves when they found the remains of the DeSouza boy in the tree, missing five years.

It just didn’t help for Rizzi to have seen all that deli meat under the floréscent counter lights in the corner window. And now standing ankle-deep in old trash, staring down at a severed leg at the base of the wheelchair, a partial hand next to the wheel closest to the street.

Both limbs were already stiff and grey from the cold and the gravel and shit the wind was blowing down the alley again.

* * *

By eight o’clock, the alley crowd was crowded with the men who only got together when someone cashed in their chips, voluntarily or otherwise.

Bervid, the Assistant M.E., speculated that, due to the lividity and possible muscle contractions, the owner of the severed limbs should be considered deceased. He didn’t make it a joke, because it was a big enough yuk that everyone there had to wait in the damn cold so that he could tell them what they already knew.

There was minimal blood patterns, and the thought of a killer with a blowtorch seemed that much saner. Unless he was cocky enough to be bringing the body parts back to the scene of the abduction, after killing the crippled man elsewhere.

The photographer snapped away, the lab tech leaned against the alley wall and caught a cockroach in his collar for the effort. Morisette was informed by the day bartender at the Rialto that a guy in a chair often hanged behind the bar, back by the steam vents. Name might be Hatch or Hutch, and, yes, he bought a bottle of Night Train most every time he was in possession of ninety-eight cents plus state sales tax.

Morisette went back to the scene with the possible I.D. to find Detectives Daves and Petitt from the Violent Crimes Unit checking the alley for clues and bagging several pieces of evidence that the tech had already dusted.

The bags were labelled like this:

* * *

The Forensics Lab was on the sixth floor of the James G. Riordan Police Headquarters on Eleventh and State, renamed in 1981 after the highest ranking officer—a deputy lieutenant—was killed in a shootout at the Marina Towers.

Waiting for the elevator in the lobby, a television reporter investigating corruption in the Marquette District overheard the technician and photographer talking about the most recent killing. That night, the newscast played it up for all it was worth, one bottle blond anchorperson making a plea bordering on tears for the Painkiller to stop attacking men who couldn’t defend themselves properly.

Later in the newscast, conveniently fresh-faced again in a taped segment, the newswoman began a five-part exposé on diet fads.

Chapter Twelve

“Wish you could be here for the party.” Mike Surfer’s raspy voice was overlapped by the clacking of pool balls. He was wheeling alongside Gramma on her left, down the red-and-white carpeted center aisle of the Marclinn.

At one of the tables that hadn’t been lowered for those in chairs, Reve Towne and Evan Shustak played a game of Eight Ball. The two often ran errands for the residents. Reve was a stunning henna-haired girl of twenty who had just started a freelance writing career, after graduating from Columbia that spring, whereas her companion, Evan, fancied himself a superhero who answered to the name The American Dream. It was Reve’s plan to write about Evan one day, but not out of love or money. She certainly felt a liking for the twenty-nine year old cerebral palsy victim, but the story she would tell would not be one of exploitation.

“Hush, now, Michael.” Wilma placed a pale fish of a hand over Surfer’s own. To her right, Etch was furiously writing something in his notebook. “You’ll be fine with all these friends... Reve and Evan will be there, right?” She said this last in their general direction, and both echoed the fact. “And that fellow you mentioned, Vic was his name...?”

“Oh, I know it be time you was visiting the cemetery.”

“Why, you won’t even miss me, you anchorhead!” She continued on as if maybe he was a news commentator: the 5:00 television personalities were constantly interrupted, contradicted, and generally put in their place by the Wilma Jerricksons of the world. “And it’s not like your Surf City party is going to be the last one the boys here ever throw!”

“Don’t know why I went an planned this thing for the ninth...”

“Hush now, Michael.”

“But it’s not like I forget when Madee’ya’s day rolls around, and I can even remember the last time I be talking with Chubby Love and Reggie.” His head moving back and forth in disbelief at his, to him, stupidity. “I’m supposed to be knowin’ your special days, Gramma!”

“I said hush..” She put a finger over his shunt, took it away almost as quickly. “Gritty. You make sure you clean it after dinner, Michael!”

“Aw...” Surfer’s voice was a raspy whisper when he didn’t cover the plastic. He wasn’t falling for her attempt to change the subject.

“Aww...” She said right back. “Just keep an eye that Karl he takes good pictures. Tell him to get one of you under that sign I colored.”

Both looked back at a 16x20 placard that was hanging above a row of potted plants. Brilliant reds and blues helped it stand out on the wall of herringbone grey:

SURF CITY

Come hang ten on Friday, December 9 1988

It wasn’t until she crayoned the date in red that Wilma had realized that the day was also the tenth anniversary of her husband Herbert’s death. Later that day, she would wheel out to her normal “sightseeing” perch by the Chicago Theater, caddy corner to the Marclinn. Instead of coming back, though, today her nephew Henry was picking her up at the end of his shift. Henry worked for Streets & San, and Wilma got such a kick out of being lifted into the cab of the blue city vehicle.

Both Surfer and Gramma sat, and chatted about other things, and soon after they waved goodbye to Reve and Evan, who would be by later for the party, Surfer looked over at Wilma Jerrickson to find her softly snoring.

His thoughts drifted to his own “special day”— August 2nd—the day his only lover had died. Mike Surfer had met Madee’ya Stonewell in 1972, a young girl with muscular dystrophy attending City-Wide College and majoring in business. He had been Mike Surles back then, a messenger for Lassa Services on DesPlaines. The “Surfer” part was unthought of: the crippling arthritis born of dozens of childhood falls, an equal number of Chicago and Gary, Indiana winters, had not yet set into his hips and knees.

Not all that many people seemed to be bothered by Surles’ physical condition, but he was also mostly ignored. Madee’ya, sloe-eyed and light-skinned, was the first to show any physical attraction towards him,

Their living together had been forged in the roiling pit of unwary confidences specific to their times. Almost two decades ago, when dinosaurs still roamed the earth and gang members considered themselves part of social clubs instead of factions in religious organizations, they shared a garden apartment on Federal Street, near the Robert Taylor Homes. Racial discrimination, at least that of the blatant kind, was in its death throes. But black on black crime will always be a kind of plague in this city.

The bullet intended for another—weren’t they all?—that took Madee’ya’s life also served to cripple Surles. He soon gave in to the chair, to the street. The street gave him independence, and he understood why Reggie Givens liked staying on those streets, playing his cards for days at a time, shacking up at another hotel for weeks at a time. Surfer had done that routine to sing out the seventies.

Done did it good. Spent a decade in the vicinity of the Viceroy on West Madison, starving for tears and liquors. If it wasn’t for the Marclinn and Gramma, well, he could very easily have ended up like Screaming Mimi, up at the St. Benedict’s Flats, or Blackstone Shatner, a man who spent his days huddled in the shadows of the Congress Parkway off ramp, drinking Johnnie Walker out of a faded Dynamo detergent measuring cup.

Once, he thanked the Lord above for a woman named Madee’ya. If it wasn’t for Gramma, though...

He watched as she slept, the dark hairs on her upper lip moving from left to right as she quietly snored. At torso level on the white pillar behind her was a bronze plaque. It was a gift presented to the Marclinn five years ago by Randall Andrew Sink, a resident who had moved to Torrance, California, after selling his first novel, a journal entitled Paingrin. As Wilma Jerrickson’s chest rose and fell, her hair touched the bronze, making Surfer to think of the sun and the moon.

The plaque was the most quoted of the former resident’s personal entries. It read:

LOVER DOLL

Eleven pm: the nightly tryst with me the empty vessel. I arch my back to receive it. A moment’s relief to complete a task. Muscles tighten, Paingrin purrs. How long since I lost my virginity?

Randall Andrew Sink

Chicago: March 5 1984

Reading the words made him think of Madee’ya once again. Abruptly, Wilma uttered a snore that sounded like a plane going into a stall. When the imaginary plane crashed into her chest, she awoke.

“I said, I’ll tell Herbert you said hello, and that you’ve been watching over me, Michael.” She grabbed his calloused hand and kissed it softly.

* * *

And so it was that he had been walking down State Street, just north of Madison, content upon having just purchased a salmon-colored shirt from Chess King. He had actually spoken a few lines to the sales girl. Her name was Candie. She had liked his Australian jacket.

And here he was on the street, smiling. It was early rush hour, and he felt certain and secure. Moving through the crowds at any pace faster than the trudging majority, as well as competing with commuters rushing single-mindedly to catch their subway trains and buses, one had to have the grace and perseverance of Walter Payton or Brian Piccolo. The Bears linebacker who had died of cancer had always been a personal favorite of Father’s. And it was worse in the summer months, when hip-hop wannabes and bongo players took up two whole storefronts with their pointless gyrations.

He was standing next to the kiosk for the Washington Street subway when he spotted his next chosen one. It wasn’t like a fever withdrawal from the evils of drugs or alcohol had suddenly overcome him; he wasn’t gouging canals in the sides of his face, or hallucinating imaginary fifteen-foot clowns dangling from the fire escapes of the old State-Lake Building.

No, it wasn’t anything as simple as that. It was a head rush from his god—Haid had once heard a song entitled “Drop Kick Me, Jesus” and it made sense to him—his true father, The Lord, a gurgling orgasm of sudden rapture, of sedate knowledge and understanding barreling through his senses like a runaway train.

A divine feeling, perhaps the same kind that Uncle Vince had gotten from his drinking, from forcing Haid to walk around the Tooker Place apartment half-nude. He enjoyed being controlled. Now, with this... this power, he was a puppet to a HIGHER FORCE, and that meant that martyrdom was his. But there was so much to do, so many to take with him...

He watched the old woman in the wheelchair crossing Randolph Street. She would be happier inside of him, with Heaven only a breath away.

Behind him, an Electronics and Pawn Shop was blaring the same radio station over a dozen stereo systems. A band named Cutting Crew was singing a song...

“I just died in your arms tonight, it must have been something you did...”

He crossed the street to follow the woman. Snatches of conversation: two black women talking about their jobs at a credit collection company on Michigan, loud voices punctuated by louder munches of caramel corn, jabbering about Gee-Mac, General Motors Acceptance Corporation, dressed in black trench coats, their brown hands and red fingernails diving into the bags of corn like predators’ claws. A bike messenger for one of the law firms singing “Spread your wings and fly” as he weaved south against the red light. The heady smell of damask roses from Callen’s Flowers, almost obscene in the bone-chilling twilight.

The woman in the chair would not have to worry about the cold much longer, Haid thought.

* * *

A few minutes before, Mike Surfer had sat with his hand pressed to the glass door of the Marchinn, watching as Wilma Jerrickson perched herself near the curb ram, her left hand grasping an Illinois Bell telephone stand until the last of the cabs had accelerated through the yellow light. He watched as she rested in front of Shopper’s Corner, the cherry red neon Magikist lips washing its color into her hair. Behind him, Karl and Etch were having a minor argument over some sports statistic.

Gramma’s small frame was finally lost from view as she turned north, passing under a La Croix mineral water billboard.

Surfer nodded to Nutman at the front desk, reading a Joe R. Lansdale suspense novel, before wheeling back up to his room. He had to clean his shunt, he recalled Gramma’s reprimand guiltily, and it wouldn’t hurt to wash up a bit. He hoped that Victor Tremulis would come by tonight. Surfer had invited the boy the night the second man had been found cut up and murdered.

He knew how difficult it was for Victor to meet new people.

* * *

That Michael, Wilma thought as she increased her speed after passing Walgreens. He worries about people like me too darn much. What’s going to happen to me in a crowd like this...?

Even after rush hour ended, there would be stragglers and window shoppers. State Street had achieved mall status during the Byrne administration. Lady Jane had followed up on Mayor Bilandic’s “Beautiful Chicago” theme by giving the city’s east-west base street a needed facelift. A hundred trees had been planted along the half-mile stretch that designated the mall, the sidewalks had been extended and paved with octagonal grey brick, and car traffic was closed between the elevated tracks at Van Buren on the south and Lake Street on the north.

She stopped at the Benton Place alleyway that ran along the south end of the Chicago Theater The marquee lights had been turned on when dusk was still a rumor. Gregg Aliman was putting on a show tonight, whoever he was. Now, Sinatra...

As she backed into the alley, a passerby was telling her companion about a cat who went “poody” on her stole. In front of Shoppers Corner, the black preacher Marclinn residents knew as Brother Preacher Man tapped his humming microphone to ensure that it was working.

Another nice man who helps others, she thought. Just like Michael... The sidewalk preacher spoke nightly on the evils of tobacco, adultery, and crack: Wilma caught a whiff of baking bread from Skolnik’s each time a gust of wind came up around her. She fingered the babushka in her pocket, deciding to tie the lilac colored cloth like another scarf around her neck, thinking that Henry would be driving up any minute now.

Henry Mazjec was her nephew and had worked for the city for eighteen years. More to please his auntie Wilma than his father Bernard, Henry, a thin man who dressed like he was one of Eliot Ness’s Untouchables, picked Gramma up every December ninth, so that she could visit St. Adelbert’s on the tenth, and on whatever holiday gettogethers there were.

The cold was making her giddy, huddled up in her ‘sweater and jacket and long underwear under her grey slacks. Oh, Henry, where are you? Then, just to think about something other than the wind, you’ll look better in a sweater washed in Woolite...

* * *

At the Marclinn, Colin Nutman was talking to Mike Surfer over a Co’Cola. “Mike, you want to wheel out there and protect Grandmama,” the Englishman with the de-formed hand said. “That’s it, ennit?”

“She’s so tiny, Colin.”

“Mike, the papers are saying this guy uses a blowtorch on his victims. How’s he gonna get away with that in front of the theater, hmmmm?” Nutman often went right to the jugular.

“She’s so tiny,” Surfer repeated.

* * *

In the Benton Place alleyway, Francis Haid stepped forward to say hello.

Chapter Thirteen

“Don’t you dis me,” Conover said to the hustler leaning in the doorway of Ronnie’s. “You best not play me for some bluegum moke, Erwin. I’m tellin’ you what it is, like.”

The off duty cop from the district across the river was standing next to a beater of a Gran Torino. Only car fuckin’ spics ever buy, he thought every time he saw one cruising the streets. When he was down slummin’, as the cops at Chicago Avenue or Saloon Street called the Loop beats, he was very big at trying to hip to the black experience. About twenty years too late.

Erwin “Smooth Tee” Truvillion, his unlucky sounding board, thought that the blond cop was better suited to block traffic. Only reason he was down here clownin’ was to impress that white trim that, right this minute, was waiting in line for her steak dinner. Tee shot a brown eyeball into the fast food joint and saw Conover’s cop pal Mather further back in line by the steam tables: Ooo-wee, Home. Tee had to admit that Reve Towne was one fine piece.

He guessed that Conover was blowing pone his way to catch the trim’s attention that he was hip. It seemed that the grey meat only showed when the girl was visitin’ that cripple place across the street. Now, Conover was right in his knowledge that Tee made his living by procuring gold chains from the necks of unsuspecting El riders and hawking the golden lovelies out here when the dark came out.

“I’m sayin, m’man,” Tee responded with the finest in hustler panache. “These belonged to mah sistuh an’ she doan wannem an’mo, dig?” This coming from a man dressed in the newest threads: black Perry Ellis slacks with double creases, matching tie and wool scarf, and a tranquil light-blue oversized Girbaud shirt with clusters of Morse code-like dots and dashes across the chest. His ankle-length black leather trench coat was open, and the many gold chains “his sister” had offered up for sale rested in a half-dozen drooping pockets.

What a joke this all was.

* * *

The preacher’s mike finally kicked in:

STOP SINNERS, his litany always started. Do not HEED the SINS of tobacco or of alcohol forsake of sex outside the wedded... the WEDDED bounds of Ho-ly Ma-tri-Mo -ny! Re-PENT!

In different ways, Erwin Truvillion and the preacher, Charles Latimore, were both on the same team.

The crowd passing before him broke and he saw the old woman, he couldn’t think of her name, from the place across the street. She was talking to a large man in a padded jacket. Looked as if the guy was pushing her backwards, and that was crazy.

* * *

“Crumbs.” That was the first thing she said to him.

Stepping closer, he realized how truly small she was. He towered above her. The gold fillings in her teeth were spattered with melted cheese. And Francis Haid was probably as tall to her as the theater marquee was to himself.

She pointed to the ground behind him.

“Urn, pardon. Ma’am?” Polite, the way Father had taught him.

“Crumbs,” Wilma repeated, as if the word alone would sate both of them. He looked into her wide eyes. “’S funny, young man,” she had to raise her voice above another gust of wind. “I’m too old and my eyesight is so bad that I can’t even read the bus route signs. Not that half the buses don’t even have chair lifts.” She mashed her tongue to the side of her mouth, a defiant gesture.

“But I can see those crumbs.”

Haid couldn’t see anything on the ground resembling crumbs of any sort. Maybe she meant the hard snowflakes. The usual detritus was there, in the gutters around the curb and wedged into the octagonal tiles. Wrappers for Kit Kats and a Butterfinger, the latter being only partly consumed, the orange insides making it appear in the twilight as a florescent turd. Crumpled packs of cigarettes and a dozen or more discarded flyers advertising ten percent off jewelry. To the immediate right of the alley was a planter. The corpse of a bird lay in the corpse of the plant.

“Can’t see them, son?” The crafty smile again. And she called him son...

“There they are, over to the left. There, see?” It was a game she played, this failing eyesight gag, to keep the chill out of her bones.

Haid was all set to go along with his company’s delusion when he did see the bits of bagel near the bird’s remains. Shit, he thought. What a last meal.

“I’ll admit you do have better eyesight than I do, ma’am.”

“So sweet, so sweet.” Wilma’s head swayed as if with romance.

Truth be told, the Painkiller would be turning her head soon enough. It would take several more tries before he would get it done right. The way Father expected of him.

“Anyway, that’s not the point.”

“Pardon?” Haid shook his head in confusion, strands of hair made oily by his compulsion in using Glover’s hair tonic a dozen times each day falling from place.

“No, son.” He smiled at her use of that word again. “What I mean is: why can’t I read the damn bus stop signs anymore? Oh, I can’t go telling Michael that, but how do they expect me, or, God forbid, someone worse off than me, to get around in this city? Sometimes I think, you know what I think,” and to this, Haid shrugged, “I think, my kind of town? Hah! Someone should go wake Mr. Sinatra up from his daydream.”

“I can help, really I can.” Haid spoke like he still had trouble believing it himself. He reached down and firmly touched her shoulders, realizing at once that her bones felt as hollow as flutes. He was afraid to massage them.

“Oh, this life,” she sighed, the f in life trailing off like a sputtering firecracker in a ghetto housing project. A tired sound.

The veins pulsed in his hands. His skin moved in waves, up and down his arms, pinching where the ripples met his cheap watchband. His hands were hot bricks.

His heart beat three times, each beat like the click of empty chambers in a gun.

“… on the way, sure as the sun comes up and the day is long, winter’s here to stay awhile.” She was still smiling, still talking.

The hell if the days were any longer, he thought, but let it pass. They were both on their way to their graves. He never expected to reach her age. He wondered how cold she really was. He smelled dying things all around him.

The entire length of his arms tingled now. They were now a dozen feet back from the street. To their immediate right, at the intersection of the north-south breezeway separating Marshall Field and the Trailways bus terminal, was a battered set of red garbage drums. The drums sat beside double doors, and the doors’ windows were cross-hatched with greasy hand prints.

“No, I don’t mind the cold. Lived here a long time. Long time.” Wilma Jerrickson clucked her tongue. Haid gazed down at her wrinkled face, her thin neck with flesh sluicing off of it like melting wax on a candle stem. The flesh dripped down into the folds of her heavy jacket.

“Yes,” he agreed. “I’ve lived here all my life, too.”

“Lived in Uptown, I did.” She made a count of numbers using thumb and forefingers. “Before that, oh maybe six years, we lived on the Southwest side. 43rd and Whipple.”

The sounds from the street had died away. Haid knew it was time for her to make peace with his God.

Chapter Fourteen

So, lookit here man: like, the Tee had been all ready to chill out and cool down man, you know, take a chill pill, but then, like, you see, this low-rent cracker Conover goes and says, “Man,”— this was in a whiny, piggy voice, you know?— he says, “Man, I’ll leave you dyed, fried, ‘n laid to the side!” An’ so’s Tee’s itchin’, like, scratchin’ away like’n he’s got lice makin’ home of his short hairs, when Brother Preacher Man he makes an appearance. Says the show must go on, like.

The Brother From Another Planet, like, he goan go see Gramma down by the Thee-ater, see’s she not in trouble, some kinda hinky vibes he be feelin’, you know? So, he go and leave Tee from his hoedown showdown wit’ de copper cracker muddah—fakker to man the mike instead. See, the Tee he owes the preach so he says yes of course he be watch the mike, n’ the Brother is gone like into the erif.

The cop Conover he smile a shit-eatin’ grin when Mather he comes out of the steak place. The Tee mutters under his breath as he picks up the microphone. “Muddah-fakken greymeat,” he spits.

Then he smiles beatifically at the passing crowd.

“Our Father, Who Art In Heaven,” he begins, believing it.

* * *

Haid could no longer feel his hands on the woman’s frail shoulders. He kneaded the soft flesh as if each bulge was one of the Zywiecka, beer sausages, Father would bring home from Mitch and Janina’s on Friday afternoons.

“You know, son,” Wilma seemed oblivious to her impending salvation, yet he still saw a knowing wink in her right eye, gleaming like the chrome in her chair.

“I’m taking you home now,” his voice rolled out in waves. It was difficult to keep his voice level. His chest, his other body parts, strained. He tried to stop thinking about the other body parts, though Father had said that there was nothing to be afraid of.

He clenched his teeth until they, too, throbbed.

“All right,” the woman looked up at him, the deep hue of her eyes reflecting decades. He bent down closer. “Son,” she finished.

A tear slipped down her right cheek and sizzled into the grey folds of his jacket. Moving back for purchase, he steadied himself for the one final thrust into his chest. Into the promised land. My lungs are blue skies, he thought.

Then he heard the voice. No, not Father’s. The voice wasn’t coming from within his chest, but from behind him, behind them, sounding both out-of-breath and wary, questioning.

“Ma’am? Are you there, ma’am?”

The woman seemed to recognize the voice, Haid thought. They were just opposite the double doors, smells of syrup and grease around the garbage cans. Teal posters for a bar called Nolan Void were stapled to the door frame.

He pushed the chair with ease, propelling it backwards as he chanced a look over his shoulder. The action made him accidentally tip the chair backwards on two wheels.

Father, it’s going badly!

The woman in the chair seemed to be an elf or some other comedic creature, bouncing this way and that, already feeling the rapture.

FATHER!

If the rock that the wheelchair had caught on was a sign from above/within him, then it was certainly a badly conceived one. Perhaps it was a test. One he might fail.

Fifty feet behind them, Brother Preacher Man came into view. He could hardly see the silhouette of the chair and the huddled form around it.

Haid bit down hard on the inside of his right cheek. Father was reprimanding him, it wasn’t right yet to have someone bearing witness to the miracle and the rapture and the glory to you, o’ Jesus CHRIST! the wheelchair’s left wheel caught on the rock. He fell forward, and, forgetting where his hands were positioned, put pressure in all the wrong places.

He squeezed the old woman’s shoulders and Wilma Jerrickson’s clavicle broke in two places. Her right scapula splintered under his grip. The Painkiller’s grip. Unable to release his hold, his fingers slid through her skin, silently tearing through the ligaments. The bursa—a small sac that cushions the tendons from the bone—broke and he felt the warmness of the fluid caressing his fingertips.

There was no blood yet. His body tilted forward, and a dozen or more strands of the woman’s hair fizzled into his chest at nipple level.

* * *

The reverend Latimore heard the metallic sounds of the chair in the shadows. He had read the papers, even the Defender was now talking about how the killer was using a fast-action acid on his victims, and when he smelled the burning flesh, he began to run even faster.

* * *

Haid looked down at the woman, appalled at the angles her shoulders and forearms now took. But that wasn’t all. Her head had turned to the right when her collarbones were crushed. And now it was halfway inside of his chest. He’d have to watch her face as he pulled her in further and he never had to do that before.

The woman’s left cheek slapped against Haid’s chest like a smooth rock on pond water. He could hear the rapid breaths of the person behind him drawing closer. With the woman’s face dissolving into him, Haid did one last turn and fit the chair snugly between two garbage bins. What was left of the face had contorted into a joker’s visage. His thighs were now touching the padded arms of the wheelchair. The woman’s arms lay limply at her sides. Her hair sparked and flickered into him, quick blue flashes that made him see her receding face that much clearer.

Her right eye was gone, and Haid hoped that what she now saw inside him would soothe her, that her body would cease its dreadful shaking.

But it didn’t happen. He forced himself to continue staring down. One mistake and he would be discovered by someone who might not understand what was happening. The bones in the woman’s nose and remaining cheekbone crackled and snapped with the gentle sound of breaking bread.

“It will be all right.” Haid could think of nothing else to say. Things were moving slowly for him. She didn’t reply. How could she? Three-quarters of her mouth was inside him now. Maybe she was already speaking with Father. Then the rest of her mouth was gone, the flabby left corner of her lips trailing like a deflated weather balloon.

Her left eye had broken free of its socket: Haid’s chest engulfed the area around the socket as if it were a volcanic island submerging in the Pacific, an atomized atoll like Eniwitok or Bimini. Like a weighted child’s toy—what was that ditty from the early seventies? “Weebols Wobble But They Don’t Fall Down”—the orb rolled up his chest. It nearly touched the cavity in his collarbone, then went back down, arcing around his right nipple, finally melting in on itself as if all it had been was a cheap Woolworth’s novelty candle all along.

“Grandma Wilma?” The preacher’s voice came clear and Haid realized he was just beyond sight.

Latimore stopped by the first garbage bin, placing a calloused palm on the lid for balance. He was not at all concerned about the probability that he was stepping into unknown territory. But he’d be double-damned if he rushed around the corner with his lungs on fire. In that instant of the preacher’s hesitation, Francis Haid did a sort of impromptu belly flop onto Wilma Jerrickson’s torso. Her trunk collapsed into him as if she had been an inflatable doll and he was making the air rush out. He then spun around on the chair. He had to hurry, bending down, he—“Now, doan go tryin’ nothin’, man! Gramma lady, you okay?” The preacher came into view, ready to fight the good fight if he had to.

Haid looked up from the wheelchair. “I been called many things in my life, mister man, but Gramma sure ain’t one of them!” He hoped he sounded deluded enough.

Latimore looked down at the pale-haired man, his scalp grey in the light of the street lamp, sitting in the chair. Newspapers were bundled up around his waist and legs. Haid stared dumbly at him.

“I’m very … very sorry, uh, please. My ‘pologies.” The preacher was flustered. “It’s just that … there’s this woman... I, uh, thought—“

Haid stared at the man’s yellowed teeth. “Yes, there’s always a woman,” he said. “But just me here tonight.” Events had slowed down sufficiently that Haid heard the El trains as they rumbled over Wabash Avenue behind him.

“Yes, well.” The weird remark Haid had made had confused him. “Again, I am sorry for disturbing you.”

“Forget it.” Haid dismissed it with a shrug.

“My name is Reverend Charles Latimore, maybe you’ve heard my sermons in front of the Oriental Building? Sometimes, I preach up by Pathway Financial. “When the police finally get him moving, was what he didn’t say.

“Yes,” Haid was getting very uncomfortable in the chair. It really was too small for him, something he hoped the preacher wouldn’t notice. “Well...”

The preacher stepped back once. “It’s goan be might cold out tonight, don’t you think you might be wanting religion at the Pacific Garden Mission, Mr… ?”

“Call me Vince.” Damn, why had he said that?

“Vince, then.”

“No, I’m fine here, really.” Haid shifted his weight. The papers rustled, a headline about air bases in downstate Illinois closing flapped against his right thigh. “I might stop by. Thank you for your concern.”

Reverend Latimore knew that if a street person declined to find shelter, whether it be out of guilt or anxiety, no one, not a man of religion, or even a beat cop with a nightstick instead of a psalm, could get that person to change his or her mind. But he had sworn that it was the old woman from the Marclinn he had watched wheel back here.

“Well, God Bless You,” he said softly.

“Oh, he already has, thanks.”

The preacher shrugged his shoulders at the man’s apparent cynicism towards the Lord. After he walked away, Haid counted to twenty and let out a sigh. The news pages fell away, revealing Haid sitting on what little remained of Wilma Jerrickson. “

The left leg to the knee. Almost as much of her right leg. The right shoe had fallen away from the stockinged foot. It balanced against the footrest. Haid felt exhausted, but still strained to hear if the man had truly gone. There were pinpricks in his fingertips, and looking down, he was astonished at how tightly his hands gripped the padded arms of the chair.

Another train rumbled by, a Ravenswood moving counterclockwise on The Loop, and Haid turned his head to watch the fragments of life displayed on the faces in the ovoid windows.

When the train had passed, and it was again truly silent in the night, he began to nudge the footless shoe back and forth, making a game of it.

Chapter Fifteen

“Fool!” The preacher had Mr. T mentally curse him out. Then, in his own thought-voice: Eyes be playin’ tricks w’you, old man. Charles Latimore had known the television star when he was still Lawrence Tero, bouncer at Mr. Ricky’s Disco on Garfield Boulevard. A place the preacher knew well, before he found the Lord, if you anticipate the thrust.

He shook his head. The preacher had never seen this Vince before, maybe he was one of the ‘plegics that hanged by the river. He’d ask Mike Surfer about it, the guy was always playing detective. And the Lord Himself knew what Tee was spewing to the crowd. Damn, it was cold...

Taking longer strides, the preacher had just taken his first step onto the street proper when he planted one of his size nine Florshiems on something small and square. A small black book. Bigger and thicker than an address book, he thought, wiping the cover with the thumb of his Christian Dior glove.

The cover was slick; the writing weathered and cracked. He walked closer to the neon display past the theater. Squinting, an involuntary tick starting in his right eye, the preacher read the faded script. My Daily Psalm Book. He heard a squad’s cherry, hoped it wasn’t the Tee caught scamming with his mike. Last time that happened, well, it wasn’t going to happen again or you can stick a fork in the man, because he be done.

He thought about going back to Vince, see if he dropped the book. But getting back to Tee was more important.

* * *

Haid shifted his weight. His Joe Cellulite butt cheeks were going numb from sitting on the bits of the old woman’s legs. He wanted to scratch himself down there, but was afraid of what he might touch. Maybe the woman’s privates were visible from where her slacks had burned away. He thanked Father that the wind had kept the reverend from noticing the woman’s smoldering soul.

He felt sleepy, sated. An image floated through his clouding mind, in frames that receded with each heartbeat. The image was that of a bloated rat floating down one of the city’s sewers, complacent in its impending doom as the waters rose higher and the tunnel more claustrophobic.

Could a rat conceive of himself as, a martyr? He didn’t have an answer. His head bobbed like the rat in the sewer, once, twice. A half-hearted third attempt at sitting upright.

Finally, his chin settled into the folds of his jacket, so warm. The rat stopped struggling. The Painkiller slept and dreamt.

* * *

Two bits.

Father, in the dream, lay the quarter down on the small tray next to his empties of Drewry’s beer and men’s magazines. The magazines, their covers damp and curled, had titles like Torso and Gentlemen’s Gentlemen.

The two bits was easy and oh how he loved to please Father. Silver quarter, jet black hair, grooves radiating backwards from Vince Janssen’s comb strokes. Smelling of Glover’s tonic, honey mixed with some other awful medicinal odor. Red label on the beer cans; he was allowed to drink one once, many years before. Foam had come out of his nose, young Haid the rogue. He had smoked in school, but couldn’t handle beer for a long time. Magazines with black covers and blue skies and bronze bodies. Male bodies.

He must have been younger in this dream; he had to reach up to caress Father’s head. One of the Norman Lear comedies was on the old RCA Victor, one of the few things that had not accompanied them to the basement apartment on Tooker Place. They were in the Tooker Place apartment, though. Where there were no neighbors who gave a shit about anything.

Haid put his right fingers into the elder man’s hair up to his first knuckles. Vince Janssen went aaaaahhhhhhhh. Someone on the television was looking for someone else named Stretch Cunningham. It might have been Archie Bunker. Father could have been called Stretch in his heyday, until the booze infected his legs, and—Haid took it upon himself to look down at his own body.

He was (in his dream) in his teens because there was a lot of curly hair around his dick and nuts. And he was wearing his brown and gold Jesus Christ Superstar t-shirt, the one from late 1970. The shirt smelled faintly of marijuana. He smelled many things in his dreams; in waking life, a certain scent on the street or in the bedroom might give him a déjà vu feeling.

Gently, he then let his left hand reach into the hair on Vince Janssen’s beautiful head and began massaging the scalp. How he would perform aerobics by reaching around the chair to touch his Son...! Having to walk around the house half-naked was bad enough. But it was what he wanted.

A passing El train sang to his subconsciousness while the preacher was still wiping the cover of the psalm book. The ch-chack ch-tack ch-chack of the cars sang out:

This is my body, given up for you...

Rub it in, rub it in. AAAAAaaaaaahhhhhhh, sonny boy. Scritch scritch on his big old head, staring past his strong legs, pants hiked up above the sock line. Brown slacks, white socks. Scritch scritch. aaaaaahhhhhh sonny do it. Holes in the toes of the socks. Yellowed toenails that were curled from being too long. Beyond the socks and toenails that reminded Haid of Frito-Lay corn chips, the bigots on television.

Haid hated bigots, unless Father said it was okay to heckle someone. Father had often called him a dee-pee just like his mother was. That meant dumb polack. Jane the fat waitress at The Triangle Grill used to call everybody who didn’t leave her a big tip a dee-pee. But she meant it in a bad way, as if all Polish people were shiftless and cheap.

Father would look at the magazines sometimes while Haid was scratching his scalp. He’d always give him a shiny quarter for doing this.

He scratched Father’s scalp vigorously and furiously, as he might clothes on a washboard. Just the way Father enjoyed it. Meathead kissed Gloria on television. Haid was startled by a sudden ball-grab. Father moaned one last aaahh as Haid felt his hands sink down into the skin with a sound like cracking eggs. The skin of Vince Janssen’s scalp. The fingers on both of Haid’s hands splayed apart.

His right hand was wet when he lifted it up, claw-like, before his face. Edith Bunker covered her face and cowered at her husband’s indiscretion.

There were furrows in Father’s scalp. Deeper than the comb marks. Oh God, he was holding part of Father’s brain! His mouth fell open as he watched the grey pulp web the space between his fingers like the semen he ejaculated on Thursday nights. But it was Saturday now and Bridget Loves Bernie was going to be on next followed by The Mary Tyler Moore Show and The Bob Newhart Show. Father’s brains were all over his hand. If one could have been in the dream to watch the proceedings, the half-naked teen’s expression was one of being caught with his hand in the cookie jar. His left hand lying half in/half out of his uncle’s skull completing the image.

Haid jolted awake to find that a light snow had begun to fall.

Chapter Sixteen

From the Patrol Log of the American Dream

Friday, 9 December 1988

7AM checked in with Father Marvin Melone at Baptist center, patrolling State & Superior Sre Streets on the way. Asst. man from Dillinger, Michigan by pointing out way to LaSalle Motor Lodge park entrance. Their were several packed of unopened Pall Mall cigarettes on blue vinyl seat next to him. Too old for sa stick shift—Might have been a Mercury mercury but not sure. Never understood cars or People Who Drive Them.

715-45AM Patrol. w on Superior, man in md4Osa blue suit, w/face like funnybook pig rolls down window of car he Is parked in and laughs. How Horrible his life must lead him. Cont to chek the area around Su. and Clark Streets. It is MY belief that thre dread Eighth Street Man will will rear his head ugly as thre sun it is. He ids Bound by Destinyy to make hisappearance so soon.

I will be hear for him.

8-9AM: Patrolled Clark and Erie Streets. Uneventful

9:1-OAM took No. 29 State Street Bus #4211 north to Division Street and ate breakfast of silver dollar pannycakes and glassed of milk and ojiuce. Scanned news red by man next to me. We are not at war. Name of rest. is Joe’s.

1020Am talked with Lynch at Marino pk on Rush st. Third bench is his so he claims, okay by ME. LEft him to follow suspicis look man, poss. drug dealer. Stringy hair.

10:36 AM. Lost sight of him while adjusting my armor. But it Had to Be Done. 11AM Took B train to Clark/Division to Chicago and Dearborn. Ran into Ben Murdy & we walked to his car/he drove back to hes rest/ bar. Good man, he gave me water to take my Haldol with. Wants his regards given to all at Marclinn tonight and to remind Etch to pay up on

Superbowl bet from 1986!!!!! Will do this because Murdy is a kind considerate felow who helps adjust the velcro onmy armor. NO ONE tells him he HAS to do these THINGS

215PM: Stoned man in Holiday Liquors asks for half pint of Bumpy Face (looks like Lynch when he has his Bearded). Remind myself to ask Officer Morisette if BF is Strret Slang for DOPE).

415PM Saw girl reading book on Clark St bus, gun-fighter story by Stephen Crane. Explained to her that the ending which mentions hourglass shaped footprints in the sand meant that he was lost in the Sands of Time. She seemed to believe me but might have an attitude problem.

NOTES NOTES NOTES

call Reve about Walgreen’s sale on Medipren

buy new armor for Mike Surfer’s birthday in Jan.

FIND TIME to write to Vice-President Quayle and writte re benefits for crime victims.

SUMMARY FOR 9 DEC FRIDAY AFT, & AM.

no real true crime. Newspapers say to more shooting between Insane Unknowns and Latin Kings. Wood St police have situation in hand. No innocents victimized at any rate.

Found empty syringe by Wash Sq Pkwy. Will continue to survey as might be carrying AIDS or worser.

CONTINUE STUDYING MANNERISMS. End of re-port.

CRIPPLED AND INSANE,

I AM THE AMERICAN DREAM.

NOTE: PRECEDING AND SUBSEQUENT “PATROL

LOG” ENTRIES WERE PUBLISHED IN THE BOOK

RHAPSODY FOR A BATTERED SOUL: The American Dream in Chicago; 1960-1989. Copyright 1992 by Reve Bega Towne. Published by Ziesing Books, Shingletown CA.

Chapter Seventeen

The man whose face was the city stared himself down in the dirtied mirror of the tavern’s bedroom. The man is the ancient age of twenty-eight, and his gaze could only attain a greater degree of insane mercilessness if the eyelids themselves were cut and peeled away. There has never been a red vein in the whites of those eyes.

Having just relieved himself, he washed his hands clean with all the care of a ten-year old boy burying a dead crow in his backyard. Some disrespectful jerk had previously left a wadded up napkin -- the bright pink and green Nolan Void legend a fractal image, at the very bottom of the urinal. The napkin covered the white deodorizers that for some reason always made him think of the Burl Ives snowman in Rudolph, a show he watched from a department store every December, because he did not own a television.

His name is Evan Shustak. He loved the city he was born and bled in. He did not pick up the wadded napkin, but cared enough to urinate against the inside right wall of the urinal, thus avoiding getting the tissue any more stained than it already was. Now he stared into his reflection, tinged with a manic desperation, eyes that he had to live with for all of his days. His sole consolation was this: closing those eyes only provided him with more horrifying images.

Turning, he dried his hands under a white and chrome wall dryer. His hands were nearly as white as the painted metal portion of the device. It was now twenty below on December ninth, and the American Dream was arthritic.

The wall that the dryer was attached to was made up of white and black tiles in a schizoid checkerboard pattern. Like a man wearing glasses, the American Dream rarely avoided the reflection of his eyes, the webbed patches of skin underneath the lower lids.

Portrait of the American Dream in monochrome, standing before the hand dryer. Beer-stained, though the stains have dried. Perhaps it had been vomit, layered thick enough that the elongated reflections of his receding arms were grey and shades of grey. He had actually witnessed someone turning a hand dryer upwards and puking a green stream into the grill work. The After Hours on Van Buren, it was hard to remember sometimes, because the Haldol made him stupid, sated the way food would a LaSalle Street banker.

“Why can’t people be more like me?” The American Dream would say aloud sometimes.

He held his hands horizontally under the dryer, palms down as if he was a magician getting ready to levitate a beautiful female assistant on stage. He did not tilt his hands upwards because he did not want to allow the drying water to drip into the surgical wrist braces he considers to be his fighting gloves. The reflection of his arms showed them to be stretched absurdly, and he thought of the 1940s superhero Plastic Man, from Police Comics. The American Dream thinks of superheroes many times during his days. During his nights, with the El trains keeping time, he dreams about dying.

Evan Daniel Shustak has been the American Dream for three years, but some, his psychiatrist included, would say that he has been borderline schizophrenic for many more years preceding the February 1986 head injury which “launched his career.”

The dryer stopped, its jet engine sound dying abruptly like a garbage truck downshifting in a neighborhood of bombed-out tenements. He completed some five-fingered exercises to assure that the wetness did not stiffen his joints.

The sounds of the dryer were replaced by The Bangles singing ”A Hazy Shade of Winter.” “Look around...” the song told him. He knew that nobody in the bar was paying attention to anything as important as those two words.

* * *

“Look around, Victor.” The man with the shoulder-length blond hair had said that his name was Nutman. The silver earring shaped like a skull drew attention to the fact that the lobe was elongated and that the temple hair was graying.

He motioned around the room with a sweep of his right hand. “Mike oughta be comin’ down inna bit.”

Tremulis stared down the expanse of the Marclinn’s lobby. The click of Nutman’s steel-tipped boots faded off to the right. Tremulis looked to where the man had limped to. A plaque near the front desk read:

Pain, Fr. from L., peona,

penalty, punishment.

Why the hell do they have to remind themselves of this? Further down the wall, he saw a painting of the Three Fates, each as scarlet as the carpeting down the center of the lobby. He liked Mike, he truly did, but the real reason he had come tonight was that he just didn’t have another damned thing to do.He wasn’t working at Hard Rock Cafe, and his sister was visiting from Crystal Lake.

In the months to come, Victor Tremulis would perform his own act of contrition. Tonight, he would be content with simply trying to pass the time.

He thought of himself as Virgil in Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, and turned to walk further into the Marclinn House. He remembered that Virgil escaped Hell by descending to the lowest pit.

Chapter Eighteen

It was a simple enough matter to rid himself of the chair. Father had taught him on how to think on his feet.

He shook the snow from his body. He stretched, the bones in his neck cracking. Snow drifted from his lap onto the wheelchair when he turned to stare at it. All of the woman was inside of him now, or so he thought. Sleeping had made him forget about the chunks below the chair’s footrests.

Haid wheeled the chair down the alleyway to the Trailways bus terminal, right front wheel jagged and so Haid left a series of continually touching infinity shapes on

one side of his footprints. He stopped at the side entrance, the bus line’s logo stenciled in red on a single glass door marked PULL. Haid could smell the dinner time chicken and fixin’s at Mammy’s, the restaurant next door.

He pulled the chair shut with a muffled clap and debated his next move. A passing squad car, its cherry flashing silently, made him waffle about just leaving the chair and making book. A glance inside told him that the few people inside wouldn’t even notice him. And all of them were probably leaving town.

He was right, no one paid him any mind as he entered, banging the wheels against the beige tile floor. Haid displayed a shoulder-shrugging effort of someone weary from the weather. Straight down the aisle even with the doorway, a half-dozen kids were huddled around the video machines. A young male voice yelped an obscenity. An older game, a Pac Man variation that had served the city faithfully and willingly, like a Leland Street native who was “in the life”, sat in the corner, untouched. Dust across the screen, even. As would be the street whore, the metal thing had been used and abused by the older boys in the crowd, until it no longer interested them. And, being old, the game would never interest the next generation of players at all.

The video game still had its flash, as well.

A male voice, young and bored, came over the speaker system. “Trailways Bus, final destination Memphis with stops in Kankakee, Rantoul, and Effingham.” A pause, perhaps the speaker was yawning. “All tickets must be purchased at the counter before boarding. Bus for Indianapolis, with stops in Hammond, South Bend, and Stafford...”

He glanced around, looked at the clock on the wall. Made a nice little show of it. Then he climbed to the first landing of the bus terminal, went through the chocolate-brown door marked Gentlemen, and walked inside.

He really did have to take a piss.

A pair of scuffed wingtips peeked from the shadows of the third stall like a pair of horns. He paid them no mind as he went to the north wall and opened the door to the fire escape.

Fact: he knew about the fire escape because one bored evening in late August of 1978, angry and depressed at the new drug prescribed to him by the holier-than-thou psychiatrist Father had gotten for him, he leaned against the open door to watch some kind of deal go down in the alley beneath him. Then he went into one of the stalls and sat down, not caring that the toilet’s lid was up.

In the stillness of the night, the temperature near ninety, with his as-yet skinny ass poking through the chalky white shitter seat, Francis Madsen Haid repeatedly rammed the blunt end of a pocket knife into his forehead. He did this while hearing voices. They were real voices, belonging to real people. Men who had come to gather round and watch, each taking turns at the crack in the door like Haid was stroking off or something.

He had counted twenty-seven jabs. Then he continued thrusting the knife’s end into his forehead. He just stopped the counting. The blood had written messages on his face.

Later, he drank coffee at Mammy’s, and a cop from the State Street district house, Officer Rizzi as he recalled, came up to his table and asked him with all the eloquence of those who wore the city’s blue just WHAT the FUCK was he trying to PROVE back there and Haid knew DAMN WELL what he was talking about.

Back to the present: he stood in the open doorway, the wind whipping his hair around his face.

“SHADDADOOR YA LIVINA FUCKIN BARN!” Haidturned towards where the shoes protruded from beneath the stall.

“SHADDADOOR AN LET A GUY SHIT WITHOUT FUCKIN FREEZIN THANK YOU VERY MUCH MOTHERFUCK!”

Haid thought about looking through the stall door crack. He said nothing.

“WHATTAYA WAITIN FOR? YOU SOME KINDA FUCKIN FAG?”

Haid clenched and unclenched his hands. Father had told him how to treat these people, guy was probably a jig from Maxwell Street. “Mister, you don’t know shit from Shinola,” Haid said proudly. He took the steps to street level three at a time. Streets and Sanitation found the remains of Wilma Jerrickson at 6:45 the next morning.

* * *

Just a block further north, The American Dream examined himself in the checkerboard tiles of the Nolan Void bathroom. The mask he wore over his face was a shapeless thing, a ski mask with badly stitched eyeholes. Over several layers of long underwear and sweatshirts, he wore a shoulder immobilizer, though keeping his arm free of the thing. Dirty grey now, an American flag was stitched onto the back the previous month by Reve Towne.

On the front of the grey sweatshirt that was his outermost clothing, he had written in blood red letters:

Hell’s Kitchen N.Y.C.

He also wears wrist braces and, at times, finger splints. The garments and devices are all part of his armor. Not costume. That is for heroes in make believe gothams and metropolises. In this city, all too real, this city whose pulse of despair riding the veins of lost hope was as suddenly palpable and as painful as the onset of rigor mortis in a family member’s corpse, one wore armor to survive. Not a costume, never a costume.

Without the safety of the braces, whether real or imagined, one might just as soon gape like a hooked fish off Twelfth Street as they bobbed on the bus or the train or even the sidewalk. D.O.A: Dead of Afterbirth. Bored In The U.S.A.

He glanced over at the urinal to his left. The drain clogged by bits of vomit, he stared down at two black, curled pubic hairs, mesmerized. As if he were inverted and gazing up at two high flying vultures, relentlessly circling him ever so high. In a serene Ty-D-Bol sky.

He then walked out into the bar, ignoring the stares. Sometimes, hell, most of the time, to truly see the show, you had to be the show.

Chapter Nineteen

The inside of this place is a fuckin’ Frank Lloyd Wright wet dream, Victor Tremulis thought, taking in everything, moving his head in a semicircular arc, hands in the pockets of his jeans. Waiting for Mike Surfer. Taking it all in.

He had expected to see the average rooming house as catalogued by the human interest stories the papers ran on Chicago’s holiday homeless. Rick Soll had done several articles on the soup kitchens along Madison and Halsted that about blew him away. Wasn’t often that a newspaper reporter was allowed to have his own voice. He didn’t write the same old lunch bucket “there but for the grace, etc.” shit.

There were no Bible quotes scarring the windows in harsh, red neon. No dangling crosses over the sidewalk, no sandwich board SERVICEMEN WELCOME print. The Pacific Garden Mission on South State bore a huge cross that read CHRIST DIED FOR YOUR SINS. The DeRamus dive on Poe Street had quotes from the New Testament plastered daily on an old theater marquee.

Tremulis understood. NO one here needed saving. No one had a desire to be born again. Every single tenant here was crippled; being born handicapped, they knew they had to get their lives straight the first time. Nobody succumbed to alcohol here, he would bet. Being a prisoner of war to one’s own body was difficult enough, he well knew, that one didn’t need a golden arm or a withered kidney, thank you very kindly.

In addition to the plaques he had seen earlier, up at the front desk when he was talking to Nutman, Tremulis was mesmerized by three figures at the far wall, by the elevators. The Greek Fates. Incredible. He walked closer to examine the detail. Okay, let’s see now. Clotho was the spinner of man’s individual fate and Lachesis was the dispenser of lots. Both had delicate claws’and almost loving visages. The third one, Atropos, The Inexorable One, had a mouth open in a wide shriek. Trermulis wouldn’t have been surprised to find out that the residents used the mouth as an ashtray.

He realized he had committed himself to the center of the main walkway. The room was occupied by a half dozen men. A tray next to the couches held an aluminum bowl of ice and Pepsi bottles. A man with shoulder-length auburn hair sat at the end of the couch in what Tremulis first thought was a lotus position. He then realized that the man’s pant legs were empty and pooled around his lap.

A man with black plastic glasses and blond hair sat next to him. He had no arms and was wearing a bow tie over a white shirt. Tremulis wondered if it was a clip on. An older man was seated in a straight-back chair, listening intently.

To the left of that group, two men were shooting pool at a red felt table. From one of the conversations he’d had with Mike, Tremulis knew the red-haired one to be Karl and the man with the walker was Etchison. Spider plants dipped low over bookshelves behind them. Before taking a shot, Karl cracked his knuckles and it sounded like wax paper being torn from the jagged edge of a deli box.

The front door to the Marclinn slid open and Tremulis saw a familiar face from the street.

“Brother Preacher!” Karl bellowed. “Frippin-A!”

Etch slammed his walker gently down onto his companion’s leg in deference to his language.

“Etch, I oughtta—” Karl said before breaking into a smile of yellowed teeth and receding gums. Then: “Three ball in the side pocket.”

Tremulis kept his eye on the game at hand.

* * *

Nutman looked up from his Lansdale novel as the preacher’s shadow covered the pages. And, besides, he smelled the Aqua Velva. He placed the book spine down over an ashtray from For Cry-Eye, a bar on the north side of the river. Brother Preacher looked down at the novel. The Nightrunners. The things people wrote about, he thought with a slight grimace that Nutman construed to be gas.

“Cold night, ennit?”

“Yes, Colin. It is.” The preacher reached into the inside breast pocket of his trench coat. “I find this up by the theater. Think it might be the woman what stays here.”

“I’ll see she gets it,” Nutman placed it atop a stack of newspapers. The top one, Dziennik Chicagoski, was Gizanmas.

“Tell Michael I said hello.”

“Will do, preacher,” Nutman said as the reverend moved towards the door. He reached the weight sensor and the doors shooped open.

Tremuhis had wandered back over to the men on the couch, avoiding Nutman because of the preacher being there. Where was Mike? This was crazy. The men were talking about the recent Painkiller murders.

“Zif we didn’ have ‘nough to wor’ bout,” the old man was saying. The blond man with no arms said “The cops will catch him. A guy does crazy shit like he did to the guy up at the Cass, he’s gonna fuck up.”

His right shoulder stump jabbed forward with conviction.

“Oh, there will be other murders, to be sure.”

“S’funny, O’Neil.” The legless man addressed Blondie. “You’d think that it would mean more that a victim be in the wrong place at the wrong time than the killer—”

“—but we all know that’s not how the killer gets caught, Szasz.” O’Neil pronounced it Sage but Tremulis knew his Polish spellings. That’s what they needed in spelling bees these days.

Everyone looked past the elevators just then, and Tremulis saw Mike Surfer wheeling down past the pop machine. “Mike, grab me a sodee,” the oldest of the men said. He pulled out a pint of C.C. and noticed Tremulis for maybe the first time.

Staring him up and down, not seeing leg braces or other supports, he spoke a little too loudly. “Y’ass me, some stand-up whitey gotsda nerve. Big man to go after cripple man inna chair.” He looked directly at Tremuhis, still sizing him up.

“Haveta be a strong whitebread to hold that blowtorch so steady.”

The old man reminded him of his mother; both had eyes that didn’t care who or what they impaled. So this was it, then? Another group who couldn’t see his handicap, therefore he couldn’t be considered their equal. He walked away from them, from Mike, with the voices behind him all blending together.

“I really think a blowtorch is farfetched, Chuso.”

“Was that your friend Victor, Mike?”

“Blood. Where was his blood, man?”

“Mike?”

“You’re so fucked up sometimes, Chuso, I tell you.”

“So have a conniption fit.”

“Oh, quit your pissing and moaning.”

Tremulis continued on towards the front door, who was he kidding, thinking he would fit in here? Oh, man, was he the fool...

He was so nervous he had to piss: Hoping, hell, not really fucking caring if they saw him, he went into the door marked MEN beyond one of the pool tables. He didn’t even acknowledge Etchison or Karl.

And so he didn’t see The American Dream and Reve Towne enter through the front doors.

Chapter Twenty

Francis Madsen lay at home, listening to a Buddy Holly cassette. Talking to Father, alone in the bedroom. Always smiling now that the pain was over. His personal pain.

Always smiling because his head was gone from his lower lip on up, dissolved into his Son. This is my body, given up for you.

“It was close, all righty, Father,” Haid confessed with reverence. “I had to M-O-V-E, move. Move it or lose it. Shit or get off the pot, like you used to tell me when you taught me strip poker, remember?”

He laughed, thinking about the first cleansing, followed by the voiding. Shit or get off the pot. Giggling now, giddy from fatigue here in the bedroom with the man he loved. That first one had come spilling up out of him like…like black gold, Texas tea. Well, the first thing you know, old Jed’s a millionaire.

Laughing was okay; the newspapers had told him that he had not been able to consume the first two because they were thieves. Well, it was actually Father who had told him this: Haid often got his facts mixed up.

The newspapers were saying how some maniac was chopping up handicapped people all over the place. He made mistakes, but he was learning. Even Jesus made mistakes.

The truth was that Father wanted only the good part of the thieves in Heaven. The part of their souls that could be redeemed.

“Oh, but this time I had to dance, Father.” Haid smiled at the crucifixes on the wall, ornate silver symbols of a son’s love for his father. Crosses that were once shadowed by the top of Father’s greasy head.

“Yea, dance. The first and last St. Vitus Dance. Now that was a good one...”

He drifted away back to Massie’s Bar at the corner of Damen and Augusta Boulevard, the 20th of January 1981. For everyone else in the city, the country, it was the day Iran released the American hostages. For Haid, it was the day that Jeffrey DiMusi confessed to setting the fire that killed so many of his peers.

Thinking back, he could almost forget the stench of the fire. But the rancid smell of what remained of his Uncle Vince, of Father, still stung his nostrils. He wondered when, or even if, what few neighbors he had on Tooker Place would complain of the smell.

“Yea, that was a good one,” he repeated softly.

Vince Janssen would have winked his approval. If he still had his eyes.

* * *

Later, Haid tried taking another shit, his stomach upset. Maalox Plus, drank straight from the bottle from Walgreens, was caked dry on his lips and chin.

The old woman had led a good life: he didn’t have to shit one bit of her up.

He tried just the same, to ease his cramps. Grunted. Pressed down with his generous ass cheeks hard enough to crack a screw in the yellowed toilet lid. For a moment, there was a rumor of a turd, however tiny.

Haid drooped his head, the crucifix he wore around his neck coming free from his shirt. It, too, was caked with Maalox Plus when he was through.

He slept with his pants around his ankles, Father guiding his hands to a place that was familiar to both of them.

Chapter Twenty-One

Tremulis didn’t know what to make of the guy who followed him into the bathroom of the Marchinn. The first thing he said was, “Watch you don’t drink from that faucet directly.”

He turned to look at the guy with the ridiculous looking ski mask on, thinking, “Here we fucking go.”

“Safety from possible disease is as equally important as protection against the street scum and junkies who would gladly dismember their grandmothers for a shot at getting through life in some warped semblance of unconsciousness for more than one day.” He had said that all in one breath, so Tremulis assumed he didn’t smoke.

“Uh, right.” Tremulis edged toward the door, but not out of paranoia. Was this the guy they wrote about in the papers sometimes? The swinging bulb over the sink made his shadow dance across two walls narcotically. The papers had never mentioned this guys’ speeches being like a bad Adam “Batman” West monologue.

He recalled, though, a Loop cop saying in one story how the guy was born with cerebral palsy, and his upper frame was atrophied. The man had a noticeable limp; it made Tremulis think of the DC Super-Hero action figures from a few years back. Each character had its own “power.” A “Nuclear Power Punch” or a “Computerized Power Kick.” He pictured the man replete in a shrink wrap, the legend alongside his packaged figure-reading in three-dimensional red and black: Squeeze the American Dream’s shoulder blades together and watch him walk with a NOTICEABLE LIMP!

He immediately felt guilty about thinking such a thing. Maybe dressing up in a costume was a good way of coping. He remembered a house ad running in DC comics in the late seventies sometime. A Neal Adams drawn Superman surrounded by a dozen crippled children. And in his three decades of reading “joke books,” Tremulis fondly recalled The Doom Patrol, a group of people driven to mental instability by their deformities. His first “adult” dream, in fact, had been about Rita Farr, Elastic Girl, who could grow to a hundred feet and wore a red and white skirt and knee-high lavender boots.

He could not imagine what life would be like for so many home- or chair-ridden people if there weren’t any Batmans or Green Lanterns to help them forget their own personal nightmares.

The American Dream had turned towards the mirror. He made a quick grimace. Tremulis got a good view of the orange-and-yellow paisley heating pad he wore as a makeshift cape, the cord looped loosely around his neck.

Still looking into the mirror, the costumed man said, “I am The American Dream. I am also known as Evan Shustak, no middle initial.”

Tremulis did not know if the other man was directing the statement his way, or if it was a case of hearing a schizoid’s dialogue.

He moved around him to open the door. The Dream was examining his lower gums intensely. As Tremulis pushed the door open a crack, just missing a glimpse of Reve Towne’s coltish legs, another “Fuckin-A” drifted into the room, the noise as oppressive as a lunatic’s farts, and the American Dream put a hand on his shoulder.

“Wait,” he spoke in a whisper. “Our business is not finished here yet. Mike Surfer told me who you are.”

Before Tremulis could protest mistaken identity, the other went on.

“Hold on a second.” The American Dream grunted as he hiked up his outer sweatshirt. It read Hell’s Kitchen NYC in red on grey. Slashed across like a confession in lipstick. Stop me before I kill again. A college student had written that in 1946, before dismembering a six-year old. William Heirens and Suzanne Degnan, forever together.

Underneath, Shustak wore a navy blue t-shirt that read BLUEBERRY HILL, St. Louis. “It is important to make people think that you are from out of state,” he explained cryptically.

He’d remember that next time there was a Blue Light Special at K-Mart. The back of the shirt had come loose of Shustak’s waistband; the pale flesh exposed was as discolored and atrophied as a typical Chicago lifetime.

Frayed rope, splotched dark with possible blood and probable filth, was looped through the belthooks of The American Dream’s jeans. The rope was tied tight in a double knot around his waist, and Tremulis thought that the belt must chafe something terrible.

At either side of each belt hook, small plastic bags, those wonderful kitchen conveniences, swung like tiny pendulums. Each was filled with a myriad of pills and lozenges. Some empty, others bulging like a squirrel’s cheeks full of nuts.

Shustak straightened the clothing. “I suppose I can let you in on this,” he said.

He did a kind of goosestep, opened the door a crack. This time, Tremulis did see Reve Towne and his head danced.

“I can trust you, can’t I?”

“Yea, sure. That girl out there—”

“You’ll meet her. But... if you even THINK about telling someone …ESPECIALLY the dreaded Eighth Street Man. But of course you won’t be persuaded by that evil scum. You have more resolve than the average man on the street.”

“Gee, thanks.” Tremulis felt like he was being confronted by a man with a knife on a deserted street, asking him if he were a Cubs or a Sox fan.

“You’re Mike Surfer’s friend,” he repeated. “He vouches for you.”

Who the hell was the 8th Street Man. 8th Street was two blocks long, for chrissakes.

“I protect the city from itself and those who are normal. Remind me to take my Haldol in fifteen minutes. Do you prefer being called Victor or Vic, just tell me. Thinking about my archenemy has gotten me upset again.”

“Your arch—”

“The dreaded Eighth Street Man, of course. Sometimes, when the night is darkest and the neon infects you with vices, I believe that he is the one responsible for my very existence.” He touched his belt.

“My utility belt. The Batman always needed one, even when Frank Miller turned him into The Dark Knight years from now at the end of his career. He wore, will wear a bulletproof vest and throw batarangs sharp razors into wrists. That is what we have to expect in our future.” He nodded a quick coda to his revelation. His hands fumbled with one of the knots on his belt and finally he fingered a blood red tablet.

“Stress-Tab,” he explained, dry swallowing the pill. Tremulis figured that this sort of thing—dry swallowing—would be exactly what, was expected of the proper crime fighter. In a monthly comic book, The American Dream would be forced to never shit or piss except between issues.

“Iron supplement,” Shustak further explained.Tremulis entertained the thought that he was being treated like The American Dream’s ward. Meanwhile…at Stately Marclinn House! He might have been surprised to know that The American Dream once had an imaginary partner named Blind Justice.

“Tonight I have to stay on my guard. Szasz keeps trying to get me to sit down so that he might teach me Zen meditation, but I find my own discipline to be more decisive. I will never question the man’s beliefs, but Chicago is a world away from the Far East. From Indiana, even.

“Besides, the pain and I are old friends.”

“What are you trying to tell me?” Tremulis tried to keep his voiceeven.

“I want you to help me find the Painkiller.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

“See, Mike Surfer likes to read detective books,” The American Dream said to Tremulis as they walked from the bathroom. “I get around, listen on the earie, and find out things he can’t. He has water on the brain, you know.”

“I know.” Tremulis said, scanning the room for the woman he had seen. There was Mike Surfer, he came wheeling up to them, with Tremulis thinking the shunt in his neck bobbed up and down hike those plastic birds perched on water glasses. He realized that he knew nothing about relationships and making friends, maybe if he had introduced himself to Mike’s friends back there.

And he was standing like a dumbshit while the black man wheeled across the room, his plastic plug moving furiously as the cords in his neck knotted from the strain.

“Glad you make it, Vic!” His hand unsteady, the finger shaking as he covered the shunt in order to speak. “I be upstairs longer than I planned, when I come down Colin said you was in the baffroom.”

Tremulis thought the guy had been crying.

“Came across one of Reggie Given’s Lucky Lotto Numbers books,” Surfer continued, maybe anticipating Tremulis’s question. “He up n’ left before that first guy got hisself kilt. More l think about it, more I think he maybe met up with the Pain man. I got to looking at some old cop books, reading ‘bout that guy Steve Carehia make me feel good.” His voice took on an gurgling sound towards the end, but still he smiled a gap-toothed smile.

Tremulis wondered if his friend had been drinking, he’d already seemed to have forgotten the friend he had been worrying over. Maybe he’d taken some medication.

“Say, did Evan here introduce you to Reve?”

“I was just going to now, Mike.” With both himself and Surfer to compare the man to, Tremulis realized how young Evan Shustak was. Looking at him, he tried to guess where he kept the ski mask.

“She be the only female here tonight, what with Gramma visitin’ her fambly and Cat Townsend back in Ohio this week.” Surfer’s lips were getting gummed up around the corners. “There she is now, back by the radio.”

He looked over to where Reve Towne was putting a cassette into a humungous ghetto blaster—or “boom box,” if you have in some cute part of the country where the inner city is unheard of—and he tried to look calm. Dumbly enough, his first thoughts were that she might go out with him because he was friends with Mike and this American Dream character.

Keeping with the “Surf City” theme, the song that came on was by Jan & Dean.

“Let’s race all the way, to Deadman’s Curve...”

Tremulis found himself humming, getting into it. The American Dream saw the Reve was still wearing her jacket.

“Where are my manners?” He said in as emotional a tone as Tremulis had yet to hear. “I should have helped you with your coat,” he said, walking towards her. Tremulis stood back until Surfer made a waving motion with his hand. “Go on, boy.”

The American Dream moved the arm that was held by the shoulder immobilizer. “Reve Towne, Victor Trem—”

“Tremble. Vic Tremble,” he interrupted. The American Dream seemed to go for it. He accepted her jacket and moved off towards the front desk, cape askew.

“Nice to meet you,” Reve said. Tremulis faltered, the moment was lost. Typical for him.

He watched her small breasts move beneath her t-shirt as she pointed towards the pool tables. Reve’s wore her hair in a page boy style again popular in fashion magazines. A plastic teal headband cutting smoothly through her equally smooth and shiny black hair made Tremulis think of nighttime river banks in a picture postcard. He couldn’t think of anything to compare her ass to that a hundred guys probably hadn’t done before. Nelson Aigren would have called it fatal. Elmore Leonard would have simply said that it was a nice can. Victor Tremulis was too busy sweating.

He saw the front of her reflected in a wall mirror by the Three Fates.

On her white t-shirt, he saw the green and white visage of The Joker. (1989 would be The Batman’s fiftieth birthday, and Jack Nicholson would be playing the crime fighter’s archenemy in the movie; the green-haired, pasty-faced psycho was a hot commodity now. Still, Tremulis wondered if she wore the shirt to please The American Dream.)

To Joker’s grinning faced angled on the left side of the shirt, with Reve’s breast, making the widow’s peak of the villain’s hair more pronounced. The right side of the shirt was filled with multi-colored Ha-ha’s. The Joker’s eyes were wriggling with red veins. Reve Towne’s eyes were brown and serene and Tremulis thought that she might be wearing soft contact lenses.

She changed tapes. From the beach to the bistro. Frank Sinatra sang about that summer wind, and how it kept on rollin’ in. Black hair in that page boy cut, several strands escaping the headband to fall across a creased forehead. The cassette must have been one of those “Best of 19—s” because The Rivieras’ were going on about being out there having fun, in that warm California sun.

(well, I’m going out west where I belong)

Reve would look beautiful on Oak Street Beach, no doubt. But she looked just as radiant here, and for no reason he could fathom, Tremulis was hearing flashbulbs popping in slow motion. She wore no lipstick, no polish defiled her long nails.

Across the room, O’Neil was keeping the beat by banging the stumps of his arms on the sofa covers. Mike Surfer was at the front desk with Nutman, cleaning out his shunt.

(where the days are short and the nights are long, and they walk, and I walk)

Reve again, pronounced Ree-vay, Tremulis reminded himself. At the very least, don’t fuck up her name. Long, tapered legs sculpted from Cityscapes stone washed jeans. Beautiful legs on the beach, deeply tanned, he knew they would be. As her face and left arm would be. Pale now, but he knew she would be tanned the first week in May. He didn’t think her right arm would tan well. His triangular scar, the one provided by his babysitter, never became more than a whiter shade of pale in the summer months.

He felt himself getting excited now, staring not at her dancer’s breasts, but at the atrophied, withered thing dangling from her right shoulder. The thing that should have been her right arm, the muscle and flesh so shriveled like something left too long in a microwave oven. The greater tuberosity and trochlea head jutting from the graying skin like icecaps in dead tundra.

Tremulis was fascinated at how her equally atrophied forearm curved upwards, her hand nothing more than a talon. The forearm spasmed in five second intervals, sweeping upward to touch her collarbone. It was as if she was hesitantly trying to erase The Joker’s face. And Tremulis loved her for it. She looked up at him then, and he hoped he wasn’t blushing. Outside, the Loop had become Chill City, the wind digging into the city’s spine and finding a home for the night. The streets were clearing out, except for the hustlers and the dope dealers. Inside the Marclinn: They were out there having fun in that warm California sun

Chapter Twenty-Three

Feeling that he had accomplished something by at least making conversation, Tremulis went over to talk to Mike Surfer. Their talk was awkward: Mike seemed to be hurting and Tremulis could not stop thinking about Reve, especially since he fantasized that she had a deformity. Eventually, Surfer said he was going to rest over by the spider plants. Tremulis felt ashamed of his own inability to relax.

The American Dream and Reve had walked over to the pool table to watch Etch and Karl playing a game of cutthroat. The Marclinn’s resident chronicler stroked his peppered beard, his right eyebrow angling upward as the redhead put the nine ball in the right corner pocket.

Tremulis moved closer. The smell of Reve’s skin had him virtually hyperventilating. Her hair was his night; eyes twin globes of tranquility that calmed him, preventing him from running to the bathroom. When she spoke, he averted his gaze to a hanging plant. Then back to her face. All that face.

“We’ll have to patrol together one night,” The American Dream said to him conversationally.

“It’s great that you’ve been so kind to Mike,” Reve said. She sounded giddy, yet none of the younger people were drinking. The atmosphere was still a heady one, as so many indoor gatherings are in the winter of Chicago.

Her voice was opening day at Wrigley Field, Tremulis thought, full of promise against inevitable odds. (Let’s not forget, the last time the Cubs won the National League pennant, the US bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki). Too long had he gone without seeing a single handicapped woman—permanently handicapped—and it was as if they hid themselves behind closed doors in quiet suburban settings.

“Mike said you have a muscle problem,” she said.

“I’ve... had a difficult time dealing with my disease,” he said, his head hung low like he had been brought before the principal for throwing snowballs. “My doctors won’t give me a complete diagnosis. Pain in my back, neck spasms, things like that. Like—”

He stopped himself from saying like you have.

“Most likely, your physicians were stumped by their inability and suggested you see a psychoanalyst to cover up for their own blundering,” The American Dream said from the end of the pool table. “Pretty much the same thing happened with me.”

He was right on the button, but did he have to bring it up in a way that the two could be compared? The costumed man then scratched the skin underneath his left wrist brace in five quick strokes. The sound was that of a cheap comb being raked across a dead man’s scalp in a funeral home’s prep room.

“A neurologist out in Berwyn gave me a CT scan back in 1984, told me to consider the fact that my symptoms were psychosomatic, and billed me for four hundred and eighty dollars.” Tremulis said this figuring, what the hell, he was in it this far. Didn’t matter how much dirty laundry Reve discovered anyways; he’d never have a chance with her.

“I still see a psychiatrist,” The American Dream said. Tremulis wondered how he could stand wearing those wrist braces all the time. He also wondered where he got the money.

“I get disability from the state,” he said and Tremulis wondered if he was psychic, as well. “He’s in the Garland Building over on Wabash, Kal-El Wagner, M.D.”

Superman’s Kryptonian name, Tremulis thought. Figures. Well, at least the shrink’s name wasn’t Elvis!

From Reve: “Vic, how does coping with this affect your interaction with people around you? Obviously, enough people before me have said that your disease isn’t as noticeable as Mike’s, or even Colin’s. I haven’t seen you pamper your weak side.”

Wait until I get outside and grind my elbows into my rib cage, is what he wanted to say.

“If you don’t mind my asking...”

“I’m always feeling on edge,” he said. Imagining her spastic arm helped. “It’s like this, the best way to describe it is, ah, it’s like grabbing a jar of mayonnaise from the fridge and there’s this split second where you find yourself thinking that the lid is not screwed on tight, and that you will drop the jar, and then the sudden head rush of knowing that you really do have a safe grip. It won’t drop after all. No stain, no mess. Forever that split second.” He couldn’t believe he got that out without stuttering.

“Jesus God, save my bod,” Reve exclaimed, eyes wide. “What a great analogy!”

“It’s something I always think about,” he said. “Helps me get through situations, like being on a high wire.”

“It would also greatly depend on the size of the mayonnaise jar,” The American Dream said, mixing Eastern religion with supermarket sense.

“Nice analogy, Evan,” Reve replied, turning back to Tremulis. “Funny you should mention the high wire, I always seem to feel as if I’m falling head first from a tall building and can hear the wind whistling through my clothing, and as I get closer to impact, I focus on all these faces and hats running from my ‘flight corridor’ so that I won’t get my pulp and guts on them.”

She made a face saying this, either from visualizing the scene again, or from regret at bringing it up in the first place. Tremulis couldn’t decide which.

He was glad he didn’t have the balls to bring up how he truly felt: that God had a loaded .44 to his temple and he was forced into giving the world a blowjob. And when Earth—or maybe just Chicago—shuddered in orgasm, why, the good Lord would find no further use for him and simply blow out his cheap whore brains.

Mike Surfer was looking his way, and he thought, this is it, this is definitely it, when the others all turned and he realized that they were staring at the two cops that had entered through the front doors. “Lake Shore Drive” by Aliotta, Haynes & Jeremiah was playing on the cassette recorder: the song had covered up the familiar shoop shoop of the doors.

The most tragic thing about the scene was that everybody present thought that the policeman were there because someone had called to complain about the noise.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Patrolmen Rizzi and Morisette had taken the call from Henry Jerrickson. Grandma’s nephew had not seen her outside the Theater and assumed the weather was too harsh for her. He went home to his apartment on Monticello, watched the T.G.I.F. comedies on ABC, drank three bottles of Amstel Light, started feeling guilty about not checking further into his auntie’s absence, and decided to call the rooming house.

He found that, after all the small talk she’d made about her living quarters, and all the pretense he’d given towards actually listening, he could not for the life of him recall the name of the place. The Ameritech phone operator did not have a listing for Mackey or MacLachlan Rooming House on Randolph. He took a cursory glance through the Yellow Pages, long enough to see that he could be wasting a hell of a lot of time scanning through the lists of rooming houses, boarding houses, and hotels. Besides, “Lady Beware” was on Home Box Office at 9:45 and he had heard that Diane Lane showed her breasts in the film.

He called the Community Services number at Eleventh and State, thinking it wouldn’t hurt to tell them that his auntie was in a wheelchair, considering that Painkiller guy in the news lately, and he would like the beat patrolmen on Randolph Street to please check in on her. Then he opened another bottle of Amstel Light and watched the film about yet another obsessed woman-stalker.

And so it was that the two cops showed up at the Marchinn at just past ten o’clock. Rizzi did most of the talking, as Morisette had the better handwriting of the two.

Lester Rizzi had thinning grey hair that looked as if it had been trimmed at the Black and Decker store on North Avenue. A cleft chin on an otherwise square head. His lips thin, pursed they resembled a puncture wound. He kept his right hand in his leather jacket pncket while he talked, gesticulating with his free hand at the end of each question as would a neurotic comedian.

Al Morisette, whose hair was still black and smelled of Brylcreem, was the older of the two. If you’ve ever been around a Chicago cop, you could compare his age with others you’ve seen, and hair color has nothing to do with it. Nor the stories they told, or the amounts of doughnuts and coffee they consumed. It’s in the eyes. In the department, the job went for the eyes first, bypassing the jugular. Those same eyes would all too often stare down the barrel of a shot glass before he drank it. And down the barrel of his department issued before he ate it.

The elder cop had sallow skin and a hint of five o’clock shadow; if he were a character drawn in a comic book, the lower half of his face would have been washed with a generous amount of Zip-A-Tone. Black, haunted eyes that followed everyone while he wrote in his ringed notebook with impeccable penmanship. Tremulis thought that if the Morisette had lost the badge that was pinned chest level onto his right pocket, and maybe put on a white silk ascot over his collar, he would look like Lon Chaney in any of his Universal films of the thirties.

Afraid to sleep. Afraid of the full moon, because it made the city around him that much more lunatic.

Tremulis also pinned Rizzi’s grey hair on the fact that the cop had seen more things in this city, events that had made so little sense, that he was somehow trying to age himself into retirement.

“Do you happen to have a Wilma Jerrickson in residence here?” Rizzi asked

Most of the men had walked or wheeled closer to the cops. If it had been a race, Mike Surfer would have come in a close third, with Lucas Winter shambling just in front of him. He stopped pushing his wheels at the cop’s question and his hand went up to his shunt like it was a magnet.

“Mercy, somethin’s happen to Granma!”

“Give it up, man,” Cohn Nutman said from the front desk. “What’s this about?”

Tremuhis, Reve Towne, and The American Dream moved in closer. Reve touched the hand grips on Mike’s chair. Rizzi gave the girl the once over, then asked the American Dream:

“Who are you supposed to be dressed as?”

“Officer, I am what this city is built on,” he answered like he was singing the National Anthem at Wrigley Field.

Rizzi, who’d encountered the American Dream months before while on the beat with Ben Christopher, gave his partner a patented city copper dig-this glance, his tongue busy mapping his lower gum line.

“I am The American Dream.” They all expected him to say it. Behind the costumed man, Reve Towne glanced first at Tremulis, then at Mike. Vic was caught up in Evan’s speech. Mike was shaking, because he knew.

Just as she knew. ”You are here because you are thinking of The Painkiller,” The American Dream said. Morisette’s pen was poised, but he wrote nothing down.

“Do you have to talk like you’re in a play or something?” From Rizzi as he glanced around the room, and Tremulis thought that the guy might believe that, just maybe, someone there at the Marclinn had something to do with all of this.

Tremulis glanced around, as well, and saw Mike Surfer starting to shut down. He’d tried to escape into an alternate reality enough times to know how it was done. The man who had talked down to him earlier, Chuso, spoke in his usual tactful way: “We was spec’latin’ on the Pain guy awhiles ago...”

“I guess,” Rizzi began, looking sideways at his partner, “that our little reception here means that the woman was in residence.”

“Is, partner,” Morisette admonished, but not quickly enough. “We don’t know that—”

“Lordy, she’s not...” Surfer’s harsh whisper was slightly more audible than that of a repentant on his deathbed. Lucas Winter was first to put a hand on his shoulder Nutman let go with a deep sigh.

“It’s like... like a heart attack or a fall and she’s—”

“Well, maybe it is, and...” Morisette tried to reassure the crippled black man, feeling crappy because rationalizing a woman is maybe dead of a heart attack was supposed to make all of them feel better.

“—and she’s got a pin in her hip and we can go on up to Henrotin and be seem’ oh jesus oh mercy.” He could say no more. Spittle was coming out of his shunt and the corners of his mouth.

“Well, let’s just start at square one, okay?” Rizzi looked back at Morisette as if his partner was a court stenographer and he was chief prosecutor for the state. He also knows in his gut that The Painkiller was out hunting, he liked these brutal nights, as if he was punishing the brave ones.

“We caught the call, talked to this guy, claims Jerrickson wa—is his auntie or something.” He pronounced the word to rhyme with Dante.

“Her nephew—” Surfer’s mouth moved hike he had just recently tried gluing it shut.

“Yea, yea, yea.” Rizzi barked it out like he was carrying a box of “Yea’s” down a stairwell and dropped them. At least, that was what Tremulis thought. “Let me get on with it, please.”

“Heartless l’il bugger, entya?” Nutman put his two cents in.

“You have to understand,” Morisette said. “There’s a damn serial killer out there...”

“And I can understand your need to feel independent,” Rizzi finished, as he had wanted to. “But did any of you think to stand outside with her until her nephew showed up? That’s what this is all about, he thought maybe she had called it off because of the weather and then got to feeling he should check up on her.”

“She wasn’t out by the Theater?”Nutman said, thinking about the psalm book the preacher had brought in.

“We checked before coming here, no chair, nothing.” Morisette said. “The girl who runs Deadline Business Services told us where Jerrickson lives.”

Reve cracked open a can of Miller High Life from one of the coolers, startling everybody. Tremulis thought it was meant for Mike, but Reve took three quick swigs for herself. Why wasn’t anybody saying anything? Letting Mike do all the talking. . . why didn’t he have anything to say?

“She never wanted anyone out there, it was her quiet time,” Mike said. “Lord, officers, it was rush hour an’ she was right there onna corner!”

“Is that right?” Rizzi countered; as if this was the first they had heard of that.

“Don’t … let me ask you all,” Morisette said. “Don’t you people get out at all?” He hooked in particular at Tremulis and Evan and Reve as he said this. Tremulis felt fatigued. They were criminal because they had no physical deformities...

“Anybody think to look and see if maybe she’s tooling around State?” It was Etch speaking, rare for him, usually so quiet. “Maybe she got caught up in her Christmas shopping, lost track of the time...”

“One of the reasons we came by here,” Rizzi said, not listening. “Find out what she might have been wearing today.”

While they continued talking, the doors opened and Blackstone Shatner, a man of low regard in the Loop, mumbled something as he stumbled in. The wind flapped newspaper pages along the lobby floor. “Saw her, saw her!” He was talking about Screaming Mimi, another toothless stewbum, but the cops thought he meant Jerrickson.

“Where and when was this?” Rizzi asked.

“Why, out there.” Shatner was spooked because he hadn’t expected to see the coppers in there.

“What time was this, you dirty bird?” From Rizzi.

Shatner, all eyes upon him, grinned to show everyone how far back his gums had receded. “Lemme think, it was half-past Ed’s ass and quarter to his balls!” He burst into a riddle of laughter.

“Lucky we don’t beat on you, cock-knocker,” Rizzi snapped at him. Morisette had written in his neat script what the woman had been wearing, they thought it best to leave with Shatner falling over his feet to get out ahead of them.

“What do you think we should do?” Reve said after they’d gone.

“They’re right, you know,” The American Dream said.

“What, that we think we’re special because we live here?” Slappy Vander Putten said to him.

“No.” The Dream took a moment to look back at all of them. “That we think by living here that the Painkiller won’t come for us. Each and every one of us.”

“Amen,” someone whispered. It could have been Tremulis.

* * *

Ten minutes hater, the three of them were in the alley, each with four sets of interconnecting shadows. Tremulis had offered to hold Reve’s hand as they trudged through the slush, and he was surprised when she let him do just that.

“Nothing,” The American Dream said, hands cupped to his mouth. “What do you think, Vic?”

“I ... didn’t know her hardly at all.” Christ, couldn’t he think of something better to say in front of Reve?

“Hey, Ev.” Reve pointed down the alleyway toward Randolph. The entrance to the Trailways bus terminal flashed red and blue neon. “Maybe she was cold, and went into the terminal.”

Minutes later, the three found Wilma Jerrickson’s wheelchair. Later still, Rizzi and Morisette would shake their heads when they were told that, of the dozen people waiting for their buses to Bellair or Louisville, no one could recall how the chair had come to be vacant.

It was the next morning that the garbage collectors, lifting the cans behind the Deadline Business Services storefront, found the burned and severed foot of the woman everyone knew as Granma.

PART TWO

Late Winter 1988 – Early Spring 1989

Chapter Twenty-five

Weeks passed, as they tend to do when the most mediocre of lives are involved. A new county officer is elected, and Mrs. A sees Mrs. B at the polling place, the one near the Knights of Columbus on Kingsbury, for the first time since, oh god, it must have been the Mavros wedding. Paul sees Jim again, thinking his old commuting crony must have landed that clerking job at the Dirsken Building, but is surprised to find that, instead, Jim was recovering from salmonella poisoning after a skiing trip at Tallow Lake, Wisconsin. And hey, did Jim know that Fred Gingrus had an epileptic seizure while driving down the Edens and died after running off the Fallon Ridge offramp? Sure enough.

It was decided that Chicago would have a special mayoral election in March of 1989, an event that had been disputed since Harold Washington had died of a heart attack at his desk the previous Thanksgiving Eve. A famous evangelist sent letters to a Dr. Michael Surles, a Dr. D. Etchison, and other esteemed professionals at the Marchinn House—the “medical” status somehow ensuring a cheaper postage rate—asking that the kind surgeons, or whatever they were expected to be, send a donation to defray the costs of Oliver North’s upcoming trial involving monies given to Iran. Wilma Jerrickson, who for some reason had no doctoral surname on her self-sticking computer label, posthumously received the same request. Colin Nutman unceremoniously tossed it in the trash.

On the fourteenth of, December, Erwin “Smooth Tee” Truvilhion was arrested for selling stolen goods. He pleaded not guilty, said the coppers dissed him into claiming what it be like things weren’t really what they seem an’ ‘sides, the one cop, Conover be his name, Conover up an’ pimp slapped him. Listening to the Tee talk, Judge Earl Straylock thought at first that he was having a temporal lobe seizure. Tee was out of County later that night, the Reverend Latimore finding it in his soul to help the man out.

On the sixteenth, a partly decomposed body was found on the Salt Street underpass. Assistant M.E. Bervid decided that the probable cause of death was exposure. Limbs that had hooked partially severed were most likely eaten by dogs before the corpse froze to the ground.

A wheelchair was found by the Our Lady of The Lake rectory on Sheridan that same week, but Area 4 Homicide felt fairly certain that their killer was only hunting in the Loop. The chair at the church showed no sign of recent use.

The temperatures would drop to thirty below, a harbinger for the days to come. And though everyone involved, the street cops and Detectives Daves and Petitt included, knew to whom the severed leg found in the Benton Place alleyway on the tenth belonged to, the chief Medical Examiner for Cook County flew in an anthropologist from Indianapolis to run tests at the Harrison Street morgue.

The Mardinn residents held a makeshift ceremony and Mike Surfer lit a votive candle to the statue of St. Dymphna, near St. Sixtus’s west wall, that entire week.

In what was perhaps the unkindest cut of all, because of its impersonality, on December 20th, the city paid a $24.4 million subsidy to three wealthy developers that they might build an office complex where the Spaniel block of buildings, including the Mardinn, stood. It was the largest urban renewal incentive in Chicago history. Designed by architect Helmut Jahn, the base structure of the office-over-retail building included a glassy structure that would connect, in a visual sense, the Marshall Field department store with the Picasso structure in Daley Plaza. The developers, PG Anderson Ventures, guaranteed relocation of all the tenants of what the city planning department referred to as Block 37. Initial plans had been authorized by the Washington administration, way back in 1983.

This was too much for Mike Surfer. First Gramma, now the entire Mardinn. The city wasn’t even going to wait for the Painkiller to get them all. He stopped cleaning his shunt three times a day, and didn’t have Evan Shustak buy him new cleansing straws at the Walgreens.

Three days before Christmas, a body was found frozen solid into a wheelchair next to the Lincoln statue in Grant Park. The corpse was completely intact, although one of the fingers snapped off when the Crime Scene Unit photographer dropped his flash bar on the hand of the dead body. Life went on as it does, whether you want it to or not.

* * *

On Christmas Eve, Victor Tremulis (which was still his name on Honore Street, you) watched Tour of Duty and Hunter, drank several cans of Pepsi, and argued with his mother, who ended every sentence the same way. “When are you going to find a job that pays real money, you ?”

On the ten o’clock news that night, another elderly man in a wheelchair was reported missing near the Hotel Leland on South Wabash and 14th. He would show up later, after an all day holiday toot, drunk and meandering, but his initial disappearance prompted a local news anchor to again plead with The Painkiller to please stop killing the crippled citizens of the Loop.

Her constant wringing of the string of pearls around her neck was as much for ratings as it was for her own conscience. Tremulis often watched this woman with the bleached blond hair, and others like her. The ones who told the city what was happening to it each and every day and even finding time to joke about it.

Maybe helping to catch this Painkiller was his ticket out. He was in his mid-thirties and still living with his parents in their safe little rent-controlled building. A domineering mother and a hard-working, hard-drinking father. In his best case fantasy, he’d move into an apartment with Reve. In the second best scenario, the Painkiller would kill him.

What he was living now was the type of family scene that was the favorite of psychological profiles on unknowns like the Zodiac Killer or the guy in today’s back pages of the Trib whose claim to fame is killing prostitutes in New Bedford, Massachusetts.

Sons killing their time until dear old dad buys the farm and Every Mother’s Son can then blame it on the bitch goddess mommy when he gets caught Ted Bundying the co-ed population of middle America. Or so the paperbacks in the current events section at Kroch’s and Brentano’s would advertise. Or the decomposing corpses along the interstate would say, if they could speak of their ultimate knowledge.

The Dziennik Chicagoski from the day after the Surf City party sit on the bottom tray of the coffee table, he could read it through the glass.

ZNALEZIONO ZWLOKI KOBIETY

it read. Woman found slain, simply said.

Did Wilma Jerrickson have any children? Her body was even identified positively. No funeral.

His father wasn’t an out-of-the-closet-finally gay, or an in-the-children’s-bedroom abuser. Mother Diedre and Father weren’t yuppies or yippies or dope heads or deadheads.

They were for the most part loving individuals who made do with what God tossed their way. A traditional second generation Polish family who couldn’t understand their prodigal son.

He thought back, during a commercial for the new Michelob Dry, about the newswoman finishing her plaintive request in the appropriately sober tone, as good as any recovering and/or born again fill in the blank on Oprah or Geraldo might. He was thinking about her still when the next commercial for Lucky Dog dog food came on.

Tremulis reflected on his life at home, his too few nights working at the Hard Rock Cafe for people who gave a shit about him. He thought about how someone could go through the hardships Mike Surfer had and still smile every goddamn day. The others at the Marclinn, as well.

Szasz had lost his legs in the Amtrak wreck in 1974, O’Neil his arms in Lebanon, when the US Embassy was bombed. Or so he had heard. He wondered if the new generation of cripples were any prouder. The armless men with glasses never wore artificial limbs. Maybe it was a military upbringing. Semper Fi and all that.

Colin Nutman’s story was an odd one. His father was stationed at USAF Bentwaters in 1956 and was exposed to some weird radiation from an unidentified object his Venom night fighter chased over Suffolk. He didn’t know about the poisoning until after Mable Nutman was three months pregnant.

And what of the people who hadn’t found refuge at the Mardinn? Where did Blackstone Shatner fall? Or Reggie Givens, who couldn’t stay at the Mardinn three days in a row without needing to hustle? Mike had mentioned him several times, and Colin had told him that most everybody thought the Painkiller had gotten him.

He wondered what kind of childhood Reve had that she would hang out with freaks. That’s what they all were. And Evan Shustak, what the hell had happened to him to make him hide behind the mock display of The American Dream?

Most of all, he wondered what kind of father could call the Painkiller his son.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Patrol Log of The American Dream

Sat Dec 24 1988

AS I HAVE BEEN DOING SINCE THE TRAGADYTHE TENTH PRIMARILEY SET ON FINDING THE PAINKILLER.

8:15AM called 16th District (Chicago Aye). Nothing from night shift on Painkiller. Spoke w/ Officer Ileana Cantu. Recall the name, poss. from murder investigation of lawyer murdered on Lake Street El over summer months)?)

8:20AM Heard incredible story from Lynch about subway murder the night before. Had head the story from O’Malley the precinct captain. Even with ALL THAT’S BEEN GOING ON this is still hard to believe.

* * *

“…. they found some guy he actually exploded or somethin’ down round Roosevelt Street.”

“You’re shittin’,” Lynch said. Something to tell The American Dream, for sure! Maybe the guy would give him a few bucks toward blow. “Exploded.”

“Exactly.”

“Exploded,” Lynch repeated.

“Got shit in your ears, Addict? He fucking exploded.”

“Shit, don’t that beat all.” Lynch then told O’Malley that he would vote for the proper candidate in the mayoral election coming up, and the precinct captain left.

Minutes later, the American Dream walked up, making his rounds of Connors Park. Behind where the two of them stood in conversation was a row of abandoned buildings that once housed expensive strip joints. In those days, the late seventies, The American Dream could not do much to help the police deter such crime. He was not of drinking age. He listened to Lynch talk, and while the black man gesticulated with long, delicate fingers, he recalled the gaudy neon of The Candy Store and Selina’s KitKat Club. The street had smelled of a different kind of desperation back then.

“It was on the news this morning, didn’t make the papers,” Lynch said. “Kepp sayin’ you should get yourself a Walkman.”

“We’ve been through this, friend,” The American Dream replied. “It would hinder my crime fighting tactics.”

“Or, how about—” Lynch was fresh with ideas.

“I anticipate your thrust again, Lynch, and you know how the police feel about me as well”

“Yea,” Lynch said, leaving it at that.

“Do you think it’s that guy what everyone’s calling The Painkiller?” He said before The American Dream was out of earshot. “Do you think?”

* * *

11AM am angry and hurt that the police did nor report the subway incedent to me.

Unless UNLESS it has NOTHING to do with the pain killer himself. Sick people in the world today.

1220PM Am sitting in Mariano Park hoping for news. Rush Street deserted. One man walking buy. Singing.

Got me a newborn son.

Gonna buy my newborn son a gun.

Gonna buy my newborn son a gun.

1230PM Who put me on this world, in this city?

Who put this world in me...

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Ten hours before, down the State Street subway line. Somewhere between Monroe and Roosevelt:

Strutting down the stairwell on Dearborn like Elvis in his prime, proud as a boy saying the word cunt into the mirror for the first time. Father had told him that it was time to cruise the trains. Let’s forget this shit about walking the streets in twenty below or what the fuck ever.

Haid hated the subways, except maybe those around the airport, where Jane Byrne dedicated each of the O’Hare extension stops in honor of James Doyle, William Fahey, and Richard O’Brian: three cops murdered in February of 1982, the latter two shot dead after attending the funeral of the first.

The long tunnel connecting the Jefferson Park-O’Hare line with the 95th Howard line was empty. It might have been because of the Christ-Moses freezer box up top, or more likely just one of those odd moments, a break in the midnight clockwork.

The fare lady paid him no mind as he flashed his Special Users pass against the window like it was a badge or something. It had taken four letters from his Uncle Vince’s neurologist to the CTA to get him the pass four years back. In this city, you weren’t physically or mentally handicapped, you were a Special User. Go figure.

How it was, there were a ton of pedways—connecting tunnels—between buildings and the transit lines. In addition the west-northwest route connected to the north-south route by a similar tunnel which ran the length of the alley between Dearborn and State. During the day, the tunnel was brimming with commuters from the North side avoiding just one block of walking above ground to their banks and offices in the West Loop. During the night, the bums and the musicians came out to play their dirges to that part of the population that took to the streets when the sun went down, the clubbers and the flashers. Haid had often seen men in wheelchairs in this tunnel.

But tonight it was empty.

So now what? Walk, just walk. Warm up a bit. He came out of the tunnel around Monroe Street, boarded up maintenance rooms behind the escalators leading upwards. Piss stains on the cement stairs. There were a few people sitting on a wooden bench next to a Hindu-run newsstand. All they sold were smokes and stroke magazines. A TV screen above the newsstand flashed useless information about bus schedules and ads for cigarettes.

There was plenty of desolation between the shacks and the pillars alongside the tracks and the people who didn’t care as long as it wasn’t them. Across the tracks leading north, Haid saw ads for the Penthouse Pet of the Year and the Bill Murray film Scrooged!

To his left, he saw, blocks north, the lights of the Washington Street platform. And a man he would know as Lex Bastoni.

* * *

Haid first saw him as a white guy with curly black hair and blue jeans with shiny knees. The guy was sitting in the shadows of a maintenance shack, near an overhead read and white sign that read

HOWARD

trains ahead (typesetting note: smaller size)

and which had several squirts of ancient tobacco on its underside. Haid had been thinking that all the white cripples must hide themselves out in the suburbs, like Hinsdale and Buffalo Grove. Well, if they were in the city, they certainly weren’t on the streets. When the man introduced himself as Lex, Lex Bastoni and extended a hand with long polished fingernails, Haid was thinking on what the man wanted to confess to him.

Haid pulled his hand out of his suede jacket and shook Bastoni’s. A firm handshake, but half-hearted on Haid’s part.

“Name’s Frank.” An errant page of a discarded magazine slid off of the platform on the El tracks. It was an ad for that chick on TV who says “Don’t hate me for my hair.” The chick’s face flipped over and kissed the rail. Haid watched this, then continued. “Out late, huh?”

Like the guy had a home. Jee-sus, the epitome of small talk. Bastoni’s hands were dry and chapped. Didn’t have a cup in sight, either.

“Nowhere to go,” Bastoni replied in a gravelly voice, making a small attempt at a small smile.

“Same here,” from Haid. “Got a story? Makes you different from everybody else, you got a story to tell.”

“Everybody got the same goddamn story to tell,” Bastoni said, shrugging. “The lawyers and the bums, ‘n people like you and me,” he itemized.

“Shouldn’t take the Lord’s name in vain,” Haid said, moving so that he was stepping in front of the wheelchair. The chair hooked fairly new, and was colored a powder blue. The wheels also seemed to have just come down from a display. A couple of dozen feet down, a small group of post-teenagers made their way down the broken escalator. They walked toward the platform nearest Haid and Bastoni, but not where they would be in direct sight.

“Don’t go preachin’ at me now,” Bastoni said wearily.

“Preaching is something I don’t do.” Haid replied honestly.

The man shrugged with apparent understanding. One of the young adults that entered the subway turned on a cassette player. The radio was tuned to one of the Chicago stations that played “yuppie oldies,” songs from the early seventies.

“Me, I’m just walkin’ around,” Haid said. “Stayin’ out of the cold, doin’ my best to, at least.”

Bastoni glanced at the kids with the radio, and Haid caught it then and spoke up.

“Oh, hey.” He held his hands palms up, the swirls in the first three fingers on each hand a faint blue from the liniment. “I’m not going to roll you, really.”

Bastoni looked at him, neither curious or leery. Same kind of look Dolezal had given him back at the Cass Hotel. Tired of it all.

“Find myself thinking too much when I’m up on the street,” Haid gave it conviction. What the hell, he was always thinking about what Father wanted.

“Now I hear you,” Bastoni said, and they were talking like old friends then. Trains went by to the north and south, but the kids with the radio hung around the Monroe Street terminal. Haid doubted they were finding shelter from the streets because they thought too much. The only thing they were thinking on, most likely, was rolling Bastoni as soon as he left. God help them.

Bastoni told him that he was forty, come to town from Detroit a few months back. And how it was a bitch-kitty getting a wheelchair onto a Greyhound. Haid told him about his own life, how empty it had been since Uncle Vince had died. But he had left him money to live on.

The faces of the late night commuters changed. The night shifters, even the happily drunk clubbers, were wearing elongated faces as dawn neared, as if the very rumor of daylight called back the skeletal, shit eating grins that dominated the daytime Loop. For the chubbers had to pay the same price as those who worked the graveyard shift. In this city, everybody sang for their last supper.

The radio played an ad for Jay Leno on Cool Ranch Doritos. Then it was “Sweet Emotion,” by Aerosmith. A yuppie oldie. Bastoni surprised Haid by pulling out a pint of C.C. And, as it had been since time out of mind, it was the drink that made the sinner confess.

Haid rationalized it later that Bastoni had wanted to be saved, or why would he have told him what he had?

Bastoni had leaned close, got a scrunched up mean look like the wrasslers on the TV, and told Haid how he was in a chair because he had been shot by a lady cop named Koja in Royal Oak, Michigan, fchrissake, all because he had gone and cut up a few people, you know how it is when you’ve had a few.

To which Haid replied, no, he didn’t. But he had had a few confessors. Bastoni said what? And Haid couldn’t answer, his head was suddenly hurting so bad.

The man was evil, yes. But he had paid his price. Yet he’s gloating over this, his glory days story. Haid weaved back and forth, not knowing which voice in his head was his.

“Hey, you okay?” Bastoni reached forward, grabbing for Haid’s jacket with his hand. He misjudged his sudden lurch, and both men were surprised when Bastoni’s hand went into Haid’s torso up to the wrist.

The hand was just as quickly expelled. Haid was rock steady now, he knew that it was because Bastoni was evil, that was why his soul was being rejected. At first, Bastoni himself had thought it to be a trick of the shadows.

Until the pain started in his hand, delayed and intense as if it had been submerged in scalding water.

He opened his mouth as if to scream. Haid clamped his own hand over Bastoni’s lower jaw and his fingers melted into his cheekbone.

He took his hand away to grab the empty bottle of Canadian Chub, which was ready to shatter on the floor. Bastoni’s face was as white as his eyes.

Down the platform, Danny O’Keefe was telling the commuters that Good Time Charlie had the blues:

“Everybody’s gone away, said they’re movin’ to L.A. There’s not a soul I know around. Everybody’s leavin’ town.”

Someone belched like the song was telling a tale that needed to be repeated.

Thirty seconds into the healing and no one saw anything. Maybe it was the song, maybe just plain old common sense. A Chicago State of Mind, patent pending.

“Nyk.” Bastoni said, before a piece of his tongue, like dried clay, fell from his mouth onto his lap.

Then he blinked and his hands started moving to undo the brakes on his chair. The left one functioned, the right one, the one he had grabbed with, flopped like a fish off Foster Avenue when the water pollution was just right.

Haid latched on to both his shoulders and pushed Bastoni back in his chair, back against the wall. He saw his radial tendons, sticking out, his knuckles white knots.

Bastoni’s body was shaking silently, blurring Haid’s vision. The crippled man made a gargling noise as his eyes swelled up and the whites turned into a snot-green jelly. His face was completely dry and there Haid was, sweating up a storm in his Australian suede jacket.

The skin under Bastoni’s lids cracked, the thin veins turning a light blue. Smoke came out of his mouth.

“In the name of the Father,” Haid said, and then someone turned up the music.

* * *

The first bass patterns of the song curled around the two men like the misty mother fog of a forgotten poet reverberating against the pissy tiles and the dank walkways, echoing off into infinity. Or at least the Clark/Lake Transfer platform.

Then the matching drumbeat, like a spoon spaded underneath an eyeball. Digging, digging...

“When I die and they lay me to rest...”

Haid felt the advantage of Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit In The Sky,” and worked with it, like the chicks did at the Lehmenn Court club where Vice Janssen used to watch their storefront aerobics. The slits doing their little pussy thrusts to Springsteen’s “Pink Cadillac.”

“Gonna go to the place that’s the best...”

Bastoni had to be dead. But he could still pray for his soul. “Who art in Heaven,” he continued.

“When I lay me down to die, goin’ up to that spirit in the sky...”

Jagged lines of cracked flesh erupted across Bastoni’s face.

“Please Father,” Haid whispered.

A disagreement ensued between two men getting off the northbound ‘A’ train. “Mahfuh piss mah cuff allays say, he say smoke my dick right here, man.” An elderly voice standing up for his rights, good for him.

And Bastoni wasn’t going into him. But he couldn’t let go. The dead man’s rib cage broke. The rest of Bastoni’s face dried up like Play-Doh left out in the sun, the departing train drowned out the song, the gashes got deeper and redder then blacker, and Lex Bastoni exploded.

Organs bursting within the corpse, grue welled out and slopped onto the wall, little bits of hair like nosehairs in a juicy looger you’d been working at getting all week. Heads turned then and saw Bastoni’s form collapse in on itself, saw bit of Lex on Haid’s chin, saw the Painkiller simply freak.

The “explosion” had hurt his head worse than before. He wasn’t the only one spooked by the destruction. People screamed and scratched their heads. First the guy is cutting up cripples and maybe blowtorching them in their chairs, now he’s blowing them up. Well, it’s a good thing the fucker got a taste of his own medicine.

A yell bellowing out of him, to shock himself into motion as much as those around him, he flung the chair with Bastoni’s remains in front of the oncoming southbound train. The conductor shielded his eyes as if a different type of crime was being committed.

Haid ran screaming past faces more there and there over there the trains palms pressed smelling oil perfume Chantilly maybe the lake wind newsprint.

Running drying blood screaming knocking over someone anyone train doors hissing open running crying weeping staring up to God and seeing only the State Street grid vents.

Francis Madsen Haid ran screaming up the stairs and through the turnstile and down the alleyway the city council had designated Marble Place.

Falling face down and skidding on the ice, standing, breath steaming. Stopping alongside a forest-green dumpster, it’s insides as hollow and enticing as a Venus flytrap, falling again to his knees. Waist bent, panting and puking like some kind of novice werewolf.

Chapter Twenty Eight

* * *

Jackson Daves stopped typing in the middle of the word dismemberment. The very word sickened him. How could such a coward be so violent? The Painkiller had to be a coward to be going after handicapped street people. There had been no other reports from the public sector on this sort of thing occurring, no perfectly healthy John Does being found, men who might have at least a fighting chance with the serial killer.

In 1946, William Heirens left the city dumbstruck when he cut six-year old Suzanne Degnan into pieces in a basement on Kenmore Avenue. Earlier that spring, the killer had been denied parole for the twenty-eighth time.

The “Painkiller”—and oh how he wished that that prim and proper blond newswoman hadn’t jumped at his idiotic wordplay, and just what the hell was he saying things like that to the camera anyways?—was as much a coward as the University of Chicago student living out his life at the minimum-security prison farm in Verona. How the hell was a cripple in a wheelchair supposed to defend himself? Why direct such anger at them?

This was why Daves had stopped typing his two-fingered pavane. His chair creaked as he leaned back, sighing. The sigh turned into a shiver, as it did during similar times that were thankfully few and far in between.

The detective blinked and wiped the corner of his eye with the tip of his little finger’s nail. His cuticles were not well-manicured, not by any means. But neither were they dirty; Daves used the multi-colored plastic toothpicks from Geena Reno’s on Wellington, a bar that served deli sandwiches tented in plastic wrap, to scrape out the dirt and ink several times a day. This, and his constant rechecking to see if his fly was open, these two things were the detective’s obsessive-compulsive tendencies.

Aside from trying to find a serial killer.

Across the green and black tiled floor, Detective Petitt was conversing with a beat cop name of Lieder, one hand splayed against the beige wall opposite the varnished wood door with 19th District imprinted in black on the pebbled glass. Leider was scratching his sootcolored moustache. Behind him, next to a four drawer black filing cabinet, was a poster for the Ten Most Wanted In Chicago. This was for criminals with faces and names, like Eddie Weems, who gunned down three Latin King in September, not unknowns. And so it was that the Painkiller only received an honorable mention near the bottom of the sheet.  That last was Dave's term.

Daves spun his chair to look at the Phantom of The Opera framed print, not the one for the current Andrew Lloyd Weber production but rather an irresolute, utterly despondent study in brown and tan and green by young turk Douglas C. Klauba.  The print was suspended next to the file cabinet near his own sectioned off area of the "bull pen."  In this city, if you couldn't write or draw worth a bronzed bladder, but were still chilled by the ghastly beauty of it all, then you became a cop.  He wondered for a moment if that was what brought Ileana Cantu over to the Academy.  Seeing the city the way an artist like Klauba did.  Daves had been secretly pining for the Chicago District detective in training for weeks.

He looked back down at his notes next to the manual Smith-Corona Corsair Deluxe.   At the crap that didn't make sense.  He'd talked to Bervid over at County, and got the composition of the remains of Dolezal, the Jerrickson woman, and the John Doe in the subway.

It had taken several minutes for Bervid to spell out everything to him:

What it amounted to was…well, he'd been expecting the more gruesome hydrochloric or sulfuric aice, something along those lines.  Instead, what it all amounted to was, the breakdown consisted of mostly inactive ingredients in Ben Gay or Chiropractic Mineral Ice.  A call to Pfizer Inc., on East 42nd in Manhattan, verified the former.

What the hell was the killer using?  His work was of the precision of, shit, of Jack the Ripper or Ed Gein.

Christ.  Therapeutic balm.

Jesus Christ.

Chapter Twenly-Nine

That same Christmas Eve, while the American Dream was listening to the embellished details of the events in the State Street subway, Vic Tremble and Reve Towne were busy checking out a piece of information that might ID Grandma’s killer.

While doing a bit of post-Thanksgiving cleaning, Colin Nutman had come across a book that the sidewalk preacher had brought in the night of the Surf City party. The night of Grandma’s murder. He showed it to Mike Surfer, still wheeling around in a dejected funk, and he halfheartedly suggested Nutman give it to Reve or Evan. Tremulis had sauntered through the doors of The Mardinn as Reve was thumbing the copyright page of Frank Haid’s psalm book.

Inwardly ecstatic that the girl was in the lobby, Tremulis imagined that Reve had Tourette’s Syndrome, her body twitching to a hideous beat. “Vic Tremble,” she said as he walked over. “How are you? Merry Christmas early.” She showed him the book and about where it had come from.

“Think the killer dropped it?” He asked and Reve shrugged her shoulders. “Mike see it?”

“Yup,” Reve said, still scanning the pages, her hair brushing her fingertips. “Said it wasn’t Grandma’s.”

She handed the book over to him when he asked for it. Tremulis was so into his fantasy that he paused a moment to look at the black cover, trying desperately to find the bent ridge that a palsied grip would leave. He desperately wanted her to be crippled. All of his own books had the tell-tale ridges of someone having to grip a book tightly or not at all. Future historians would know of every book he’d read, from Nelson Algren to Chet Williamson.

“Psalms.” He said it just to say it.

“Grandma was a Roman Catholic, and this book was printed by the Franciscans...”

“So, if it was the killer’s, Reve—”

“Exactly.” She pointed a finger at Tremulis. “He murders the handicapped. Evan’s been talking about this guy being a wannabe savior...”

“Reve, this guy is butchering defenseless people!”

“Welcome to Chicago.” She scowled. “What kept you?”

“Okay, so it came out that way...” Tremulis bent his arms behind his back, each hand gripping the opposite elbow. Reve put a finger into her palm like a cigarette in an ashtray, only without twisting it.

“But their deaths themselves could have been painless,” she said. “What Evan means—”

“Reve, taking away someone’s pain, killing them painlessly, shit. They were defenseless. That’s it.” He liked to imagine that Reve was crippled because the fantasies showed her strength. To imagine her naked would be to make her vulnerable. Make her defenseless, in his mind’s eye.

“But he does have a pattern, weak as the connection is,” Reve said. “The wheelchairs. Maybe he’s doing what he thinks is best for everyone. It’s his disposal of the corpses that gives me the chills.”

“Reve, do you know how that sounds?”

“Yes I do, Vic.” Her hands blossomed away from her shirt. He noticed for the first time that the shirt depicted Omaha, The Cat Dancer. “That rag Phases on the north side is referring to the guy as another incarnation of the Tylenol killer. The guy who put cyanide in aspirin bottles, for chrissakes!”

“Hey, I know. Stop jumping on me,” Tremulis wanted to say something clever, like a character in a William Relling Jr. novel. Something along the lines of how he hated the Tylenol killer because, thanks to the unknown murderer from September of 1982, safety seals were being put on virtually everything he had to struggle to open on a daily basis.

“Vic, you know I’m not.” She touched his hand then and he knew he must find the Painkiller, wondering if it was Reve that filled Evan Shustak with the same insane forces.

“It’s not that,” he confessed. “I’ve... I’ve always had a kind of violent nature. Not like an angry drunk or a closet schizo, nothing like that.” He scratched his scalp, absently wondering if Reve could smell his body odor through his sweatshirt when he raised his arm.

“Like people I’ve worked with over the years, my own family, they all pontificate that I have the most violent thoughts, and yet they’re the ones that keep the Rambo sequels coming. They eat that shit up with a spoon.” He gulped as his mouth dried up, something else he and Mike Surfer had in common.

“Or, here’s a good one, Reve!” No stopping him now that he was on a roll. “That doctor down in Decatur or wherever. Found out his son had Downs syndrome, remember?” Reve nodded. “Threw the baby to the ground so his skull shattered. Right there where the other babies were. Society lets him off, the jury found him not guilty because of sanity. My mother and my sister thinks that’s understandable. And yet my father says I talk like I have a candy asshole if I say I want to strangle a stupid stock boy at the Hard Rock Cafe.”

Reve’s gaze had softened, not hardened, as he had expected.

“Will society approve of the Painkiller?” Tremulis let his silence answer for him. They both looked over the book again, as if it was the killer’s diary.

There was a book mark—a receipt, actually—on the page marked with the Act of Contrition. ”I went to a Catholic school for a few years,” Reve said. “We ended each Friday’s class with an Act of Contrition.” The receipt, faded from the moment it was birthed from the register, simply rang up the price and the sales tax. The book cost two dollars and ninety-five cents. Tremulis continued flipping through the pages.

One page was dog-eared, bent back. The page held part of a psalm, the facing page was an illustration of St. Vitus, a child martyr.

“Waitasec,” Reve said suddenly. “This receipt looks like it came from St. Sixtus.”

“Over on Madison? I’ve been there, that’s where I met Mike, in fact.”

“Ever see that crazy lady in the bonnet?”

“Yea, she’s a trip.”

“I bought Mike a book from there once,” Reve said. “Trumpets of Beaten Metal. Said how the title reminded him of wheelchairs. That’s how I recognize the receipt.” She brushed her hair back.

Tremulis wished his family could be half as proud of his disease, even if it didn’t have a pretty label, as Mike Surfer was of his. The man made him think that the Givers of Pain and Rapture had given him, Tremulis, the opportunity to be in chronic pain for most of his adult life. Maybe all of it; he truly couldn’t remember when it had ever been any better.

He looked at Reve, then at the book.

“What are we waiting for? Let’s go.”

* * *

They walked south through the alley behind the Title and Trust building, old newspapers and McDonald’s cartons flattened to the ground in original patterns by dried vomit and urine from nights past. Tremulis showed Reve the breezeway on the west side of the church where all the motorcycles were parked, and was pleasantly surprised that she had never noticed. It was an oddity, conjuring images of all these Franciscan monks on their choppers, cassocks flying in the wind.

He had asked a suit on the corner, once the guy had a helmet slung over the shoulder of his three-piece, what the deal was. The suit answered that he’d been parking his bike there for three years. Saying it like it made him something more than a nine-to-fiver behind a desk.

The chain-smoking woman was gone from her perch at the doorstep of St. Sixtus. It was the first time both he and Reve had not seen her roosted there, slapping cigarettes—Reve thought that they were Lucky Strikes—into her mouth and judgments out of said mouth; blowing out smoke and indecipherable phrases at passerby. The cold weather had never kept her away before. Both were thinking that maybe the Painkiller was branching out in his quest for victims.

The gift shop of the church stood just to the left of the holy water receptacle in the lobby—a fountain where parishioners could fill up their plastic bottles—and one of the first things Tremulis noted was that Reve didn’t stop to dab holy water on herself as they entered. He dipped his hand into the dish by rote, but did not touch his forehead. Rather, he touched his first two fingers to his neck, as a woman might her perfume, because that was where Tremulis’s muscles were tightest, where his spasms were unrelenting.

Just before the gift shop, a beige statue of St. Sixtus faced the two of them, sagely flashing a peace sign. A young Mexican boy stood behind the waist high glass counter. He was reading a copy of Catholic Monthly, and was wearing a black turtleneck sweater. A silver medal depicting S. Lazaro, patràn de lospobres, dangled just below his collarbone.

Reve walked up to him and pulled the psalm book from the back pocket of her Gitano jeans as smooth as a dealer putting up front money. Book in one hand, receipt in the other, Reve kept it simple: ”Hi. These from here?”

The Mexican boy didn’t know what to make of it, maybe the pastor was sending someone by to see if he knew his stuff on the job. And he did, all right.

“Heck, yes, lady,” he said in that humble way most Mexicans or Ricans in Chicago have when speaking English. “If you’d like, I’d be happy to point out several other such books off you might find of interest.” He beamed as only young boys or girls on their first jobs did.

“No, that’s all right,” Reve said. Tremulis was fingering a scapula blessed by Pope John Paul II on display, then turned away. They both thanked him.

“Hello, Reve.”

Both turned, startled at the voice. It belonged to a priest standing near the stairwell leading down to the boy’s club affiliate.

“Hello, Father.” Reve turned to Vic. “This is Father Dennis, Father, Vic Tremble.” Tremulis felt embarrassed that he had ever told him that that was his name.

The priest extended a hand. Tremulis was surprised to feel calluses on the man’s palm. Both nodded hellos.

“Are you new to the parish, son?” he said. Father Dennis was in his early forties, had graying blond hair, and, Tremulis would see, as they walked through the lobby, he had pronounced limp. Reve would tell him that the priest had arthritis.

“No, sir,” he replied. “I’ve been here before.”

“Oh, I’m not placing you. New to the area, Dearborn Park, perhaps?” He smiled. “I like guessing at neighborhoods the way others guess at Zodiac signs.”

”No, sir—uh, Father.” Tremulis’s voice cracked. “My family lives in Wicker Park. On Honore.”

”Such a small world it is. I taught catechism at St. Fidelus years back, up on Washtenaw.”

“Father, Vic is a friend of Mike Surfer’s,” Reve said softly.

The priest shared the intrigue and uniqueness of the names some, of his parishioners gave themselves. Not like the businessmen on the rise. If God’s son was reborn today, Father Dennis sometimes wondered if his business card would read:

“Met him here, in fact,” Tremulis looked around, like a new guest at a party. “I honestly feel at ease here. Even—” He let his voice trail.

“Yes?” the priest questioned.

Reve took it up, seeing Tremulis’s uneasy look.

“We found this”—she held up the psalm book—” actually, that preacher on the street who looks a little like Eddie Murphy found it and left it at the Mardinn. He found it where Grandma, Wilma Jerrick—” and that, too, trailed off, like a pallbearer’s breath after he lets go of the coffin and there is nothing left of the deceased ever to touch again.

“The police are doing all they can,” Father Dennis said. “One of the officers confessed to me after they found the first body. I suspect there will be more.”

He pointed at the book still in Reve’s hand. “Those are as common as hotel Gideon’s. We’ve sold them for years.”

He didn’t ask why they hadn’t offered the book to the police.

* * *

Later, when they were walking past the Bank of America building on LaSalle, Reve grabbed his hand and held it tightly as she led him across the street ahead of a car speeding through a yellow light. They went to a McDonald’s on Randolph and Wells.

They ate hamburgers and fries with large Cokes and they talked of other things for a time.

Chapter Thirty

The American Dream slammed the pay phone down, more from a nervous tremor than of anger. That detective, Daves, was still unavailable and it was next to impossible to talk to anybody else at either the Chicago District or James Riordan Police Headquarters. At this particular moment on the early evening of Christmas Eve, he was standing in full battle regalia at the third pay phone from the right in a group of seven, near the northeast corner of State and Division. He was standing between a restaurant named Monday’s and a bar inconspicuously called Hotsie Totsie.

The wind chill was now ten below. What few decorations anybody in Chicago put up anymore were dulled by the gunmetal sky. The bars were all lit up sure. A happy customer was one who drank and sang carols and spent money and left to wreck his BMW on the Drive somewhere. God rest ye, merry gentlemen. The American Dream was not concerned with the insides of the bars, or with Christmas tinsel.

The hero’s heating pad was curled at the bottom, the weight of the insulated pad keeping it from flapping in the wind with a more dramatic flair. A blackboard near the curb read FILL YOUR BELLY AT OUR DELI. Across the street, through the skeleton of a construction site, he could see a huge bottle of Michelob Dry splashed across the wall of a Rush Street bistro and apartment building.

Second time that early evening he had struck out: he’d called from this particular spot because he’d just come from the building at 30 East Division, where Skinny Minny lived with an ancient-looking Nam vet. Skinny’s actual name was Andy Krejca, and his life was a series of scams, the current one to be wearing a fake scar over a fake cut. What he’d do, is become an innocent bystander who was whacked in the face by some harried secretary with a head-level umbrella on her lunch hour. You had to be Walter Payton to walk the Loop streets during the rainy season, the rainy season being whenever it fucking feels like raining. Often enough, a yard would cover the secretary not having to deal with his medical bills, nonexistent as they would be.

The Skin Man wasn’t around, though. The Vet didn’t know where he might be. The American Dream thought he’d have encountered the Painkiller, in that they were both figures engaging in crimes. The Dream felt that all criminals knew one another and maybe got together over drinks at Binyon’s or The Standard Club after every job.

There would be other contacts. He knew an ex-Elvis impersonator who was heavy into selling things that had been touched by The King. And he had plans to take Vic Tremble up to see the girl all the high rollers called Lullaby and Goodnight on account of her deformity.

He fought the cold, squirreling his arms into the deep pockets of his jacket. It was a lime-green deal purchased at an Isola Street thrift shop.

“Hey, Mister.” An elderly woman’s voice came from just around the corner, and the Dream knew something was going down. Just like that, his instincts kicking in. What he saw was a spindly man with crooked gold and black teeth running past a newspaper kiosk, a white purse dangling from his tallowed hand.

The woman, blue rinsed and withered, cursed violently in Lithuanian as the American Dream took chase. Only out-of-towners screamed anymore, he thought.

The guy was wearing those new high top sneakers with the pump. Felony flyers, Officer Rizzi called them. The two men ran past Elliot’s Nest on Bellevue, then they were on Rush, and, then the pain kicked into overdrive for the Dream. Future streets and intersections blurred together. He assumed that the man was running for the Cabrini- Green projects.

The felon, twenty-three years old and nine hours into his heroin heebie-jeebies, never looked back at the man chasing him. The sky had darkened to look like soiled BVDs. The man never saw the van driven by Tyrone Fuka that clipped him and sent him spinning onto the cement. The junkie puked up a milky vomit.

Catching up with him, breathing heavily, The American Dream gave a shit if the junkie heaved up his intestine through his nose. The fucker brought on his own pain; he wasn’t born with it. The purse lay open on the sidewalk, a tube of Polident like a fat worm poking out. The two men were in front of a bar called Hat Dance, at 325 West Huron.

Faces behind curtains became bodies in doorways. The legend on the sign above him read:

SHE LIFTED THE FORK TO

HER VOLUPTUOUSLY SULLEN LIPS,

ALLOWING THE ADVENTURE TO LOLL

IN HER MOUTH FOR A MOMENT

AND THEN --

…the junkie grabbed his ankle.

The American Dream looked down at him, caressing his weathered shoe as if he was rehearsing to kiss the Pope’s feet.

They both, the two of them, lived day to day.

* * *

Tremulis was sitting in the lobby of the Lawson YMCA, waiting for Evan Shustak. They had planned to meet in the building at Chicago and Dearborn to discuss future plans. It was nearly eight PM now, and Shustak was late. Tremulis warmed his hands over the coffee he had bought at the Burger King next door and was thinking about Reve, that first time he had seen her. Her face, devoid of makeup scars yet not vampiric, as so many of those forced to live out the Rust Belt winters were.

It should be noted that Tremulis’s eyes, with their hundred-yard stare, very much mirrored the eyes of the junkie back at the Hat Dance.

Both men were lost and in need of something badly.

And now it was eight-fifteen and he was thinking about marrying Reve and taking the last train to the coast

(out there in havin’ fun, in that warm California sun)

But only because Evan was late.

Tremulis had always fixated on a certain kind of woman. Someone who didn’t keep her face in a jar by the door, or in separate jars and tubes and five-day pads. He liked a woman who had a fleck of graveyard dirt under a fingernail and didn’t bother to clean it out.

The coffee was cold and still he drank it. A man sitting down the way was reading the city’s gay newspaper, The Windy City Times. Reve Towne made him think of an actress on one of the current networks shows set in Vietnam. On the television drama, the woman didn’t wear more than base makeup, wasn’t afraid to drink or cry until snot dripped out of her nose and off the roof of her mouth.

He remembered the actress’s name, and the name of the character she played on the show, just as he recalled the names of Playmates or Penthouse Pets. Because to do otherwise would be to cheapen their lives.

He hoped that he would never have to see the television actress without her clothes on. At twenty after, he was in Nam and Reve was nursing him, he had stepped on a can of worms and they had given him blue balls to top it all off.

When the Dream showed to tell him about the junkie, Tremulis thought, Man, I’m not the one who fantasizes to feel better about life.

Chapter Thirty-One

On the first day of Christmas, my true love...

Well, as wiser men have said, Shit Happens.

Mike Surfer started drinking his holiday cheer at the crack of dawn. It hadn’t warmed up like the weatherman had said. The temperature outside, that is. He knew all night long that the temperature wasn’t rising because the pain in his knees told him so. The weatherman on Chicago’s Very Own Channel Nine’s name was Jerry McBride. Grandma had always pronounced his name “Jelly.”

“Don’t care if it is cold,” he said to no one, just to break his own personal silence. “Ain’t no snow onna ground to be stoppin’ me from goan up top the bridge.” He said it with defiance, as if it was Detective Stephen Louis Carella having a showdown with The Deaf Man in imaginary Grover Park. You had to do what you had to do, if you were a character in a novel or a real life living, breathing human being who was calling it quits.

Enter Mike Surfer, thinking about the Madison Street Bridge, out past the Civic Opera House. He’d wheel out there in months past and think about the people he’d outlived. Madee’ya, with her achingly beautiful lips and sad eyes. Grandma, it was now, with her little eye-openers of vodka in the morning. And he knew his drinking buddy, Reg Givens, was long gone. How would Reve and Evan, and his new friend Vic, how would they take it? Maybe there would be meaning, maybe the write up in the papers will help public awareness, help the Painman slip up and get caught.

Thinking about the people he’d outlived, as if his strength at surviving meant he was a failure.

Now he would ride the wild surf into whatever oblivion a suicide was relegated to, and he just didn’t care. He wheeled out the door of the Marclinn, in the early morning hours when Santa’s sleigh might still be overhead and Colin Nutman was sleeping at the front desk.

Surfer wheeled west, then south and down the vacant concrete canyons that were Clark Street’s municipal office buildings. The United Artist Theater proclaimed:

Tom Cruise in

The Ral Donner Story

Brian Hodge’s DARK ADVENT

He wrapped his scarf tightly around his shunt. The streets were deserted. What right did he have to think that he had been able to protect Gramma? Putting on a smile for everyone an’ for what? Gramma loved him and did he ever sit with her and wait for her nephew to show up? No he did not.

He paused in front of Mayor’s Row to scrape some street crap off of his right wheel. In Chicago, there was either a ton of snow on the ground or it was one of those brutally cold winters where what little snow there was bounced down the streets eastward into Indiana. No shit, that’s what it seems like. There were a few lines of white along the curbs and alleys, but that was it.

Rolled across Clark to Daley Plaza. The Christmas tree was eighteen stories high this year, the red and amber lights off until later that morning. Just to the east of that was the Picasso sculpture.

Passing behind it, he saw a glint of metal within the hollow wedge of its backside and just as quickly dismissed it as the remnants of a gang fight or an all-nighter. He passed a couple of beat cops, portly Jeff Macas and petite Nan Hite, the latter’s hair as dark and hypnotic as Reve Towne’s, and they all exchanged hellos and holiday greetings. Surfer continued wheeling and could smell the river now. Past LaSalle and straight west now. The sky that hazy color when true day has not yet made its appearance, like a camera scene with a faded gel over the lens.

The stretch of Madison at East Wacker was steep enough that he had to pull himself along, grasping the metal girder of the bridge curbside and then the rusted vertical rungs of the chest-high metal fence on the water side.

Surfer was sweating a thin line down hjs capless forehead as his fingers grasped a metal sign that told how Mayor William Hale Thompson had dedicated the bridge in 1932. He paused for breath, unloosening the scarf from around his neck, rasping noises coming from the shunt, opaque in the early morning frost. He glanced up at a red square, a glassed in white ring within, its black and white sign bearing the legend LIFE RING/SALVAVIDAS.

The sky above turned a dirtier shade of dishwater grey as he gathered up his reserves of strength, the ones that had gotten him this far in life. And wondered exactly when it was that things had gotten so bad.

Gramma had always said that he was the stable one, always keeping his emotion in check. Like detectives in novels who had seen it all. Like the cops in real life who found babies in microwave ovens, it had happened in Phoenix, not here. But still. In one of the last books Gramma had loaned him, the detectives at the 87th precinct were finding college girls hanging from lampposts. But they’d never come across someone burning men in wheelchairs. Men and... Gramma.

They only found her foot! Her foot, for God’s sake. There would be traffic soon, people driving to the Greyhound Station on DesPlaines. Do it now, best get it done.

He grasped the cold metal rungs of the fence, thinking on how, from the outside, he might look like a dwarf in prison, straining to get out.

Kept on straining as he lifted himself up. The shunt loosening and popping from the hole in his neck, dangling from the strap around his neck. He wheezed as he stood higher than he had ever stood, even when he had full use of his legs and Madee’ya was in his arms and she had wrapped her legs around his waist and they had done it right there in the hallway with Mike giving her all of his love standing upright on the hard wood floor and Madee’ya’s lips were all over his face and stubbly neck.

Wheezing but not weeping. All he had to do was tip forward like a drunk on a bar stool. Like Givens at Hard Times. Gramma—

Tipping forward, the air bracing this close to the water. His knees popped as he straightened his legs out. The wheelchair rolled back down the incline towards Wacker. Mike Surfer was hanging ten.

The river was frozen in spots, but there was plenty of safe water between huge chunks of ice. The ice mostly herded alongside of the buildings. Mike Surfer was at the crest of the bridge.

With the water rushing up to meet him; he wondered if the cold and the dark and the numbness were what the Painkiller’s other victims felt before the splash was lost to the city.

Chapter Thirty-two

Tremulis had called the Marclinn first thing that morning. Mother hated when he made personal calls, she might be expecting a call of her own from some other middle-aged housewife filled with holiday ennui. So he had gone down to the Busy Bee diner, underneath the El tracks at North and Milwaukee, bought himself a peanut butter pierogi, and dialed the number from the front booth.

The old man, Chuso, answered the phone like this:

“Eddie bum beddy come Freddie come steady come two-legged, toe-legged, bow-legged Eddie.”

Tremulis didn’t even bother to ask what that meant, and said he wanted to speak to Mike.

“Ain’t here,” Chuso said. “This the guy that walks so good, Vixtor?”

“Yea, do you know where he is?” It was Christmas Day. Everything was closed downtown. “Or, is Evan Shustak there?”

“Listen, you,” Chuso slurred into the phone. “You don’t give a rat’s ass about us, you want to fuck that girl so much, do it and leave us alone. Leave Mike alone, he’s been through enough.” He hung up the phone.

Tremulis’s entire body tensed up as he stood there, the waitress saying ‘Dzien’ dobry” to everyone, silver tinsel hanging above the phone booth, the place smelling of eggnog and beer sausages and ham.

He thought of last Christmas, where each minute was like hot oil dripping towards a raw wound. He had gone into the kitchen and placed his fingers within an hair’s breath of Mother’s Ecko eggbeaters and then plugged the cord in. Tore a fingernail and that was about it.

The only thing he had been afraid to try was to put a staple gun to the underskin of his knee and then use a stapler remover on the outer and inner hamstring tendons. He wished Mike was there; the night before, Evan had suggested that the two of them sit in wheelchairs as decoys, they could let Mike act as “coordinator,” make him feel useful. At least he wasn’t the kind of killer who would be enticed by Reve as bait. Reve. Was Chuso really right?

He went back home to listen to Diedre Tremulis complain about the amount of time her worthless son was spending with his colored friends.

* * *

The call came in at four-fifteen that afternoon, empty wheelchair at Madison and Wacker. Morisette and Rizzi were on the scene in five minutes. The rest of the Crime Scene Unit showed up in spurts, several of them called away from their holiday dinners.

The chair was dusted for fingerprints, an old scarf was bagged as evidence. The police were taking no chances on this one, especially because there was frozen spittle on one arm of the chair.

The chair was an Everest-Jennings, and Morisette thought it looked familiar. He was weary. The Unit photographer snapped several photos. The way the chair had come to rest, none of the men there had thought to look up the incline of the bridge. There was no snow to hold tire treads.

The street had never seemed more deserted.

“And to all a good night,” Rizzi said, rubbing his hands together and blowing on them.

Chapter Thirty-Three

The closest thing to a religious atmosphere in Washington Square that Christmas evening was the breaking of the bread scene performed by the palsied hands of the Salvation Army volunteers.

The huge storefront was bordered by the park on Delaware, and, to the south, just past Tooker Place, the Blattner Military Supply Store. Tonight, the homeless of the River North area gathered single file as if in an unemployment line. The group, mostly men, though there were several women, stood close enough to bleed into each other’s wounds.

Christmas dinner was minestrone soup, fist-sized Chunks of Gonella bread from the main bakery over on Levee Street, and a variety of Hawaiian Punch fruit drinks. Also in attendance at this holiday festivity of goodwill were Reve Towne, Evan Shustak, and 16th District police officers Aaron Mather and Dean Conover.

Shustak was wearing a plain green shirt over black slacks. Father Marvin Malone, pastor at the Holy Name Cathedral and sponsor of this get-together three years now, had mildly suggested that the homeless might shy away from Evan if he was dressed as The American Dream.

It was quite warm in the Salvation Army store, and Reve was dressed simply in her Gitano jeans, with a powder blue Elliot’s Nesst t-shirt tucked into the waistband. The two cops had taken off their leather jackets.

Those in attendance had nicknames for each other as those at the Marclinn. Shustak talked for a time with a Nam vet who went by the name of D Minus Rex. Earlier, he had met a young man named Simon the Pieman who made his living scavenging pie tins out of garbage cans. The two patrolmen had stopped by during the course of their shift. They both knew Shustak and Towne from way back. When Conover stared at Reve’s compact breasts his eyes twinkled oh so merry.

Mather walked over to the window to stare at the rabid wrinkles in his reflection. For him, his face mirrored in nighttime windows was much worse than staring at a bathroom mirror under halogen lighting. Quite a few Chicago businesses were putting halogen lighting in their parking lots so that kids wouldn’t congregate. The thinking being that kids wouldn’t hang out if they saw how ugly they really were. Still, staring out the window at his face reflected on the blackness of Bughouse Square, it depressed him more than anything else could this Christmas night.

Shustak walked over to him, Reve followed after she had helped serve a few bodies. And Conover followed her, like a magnet to steel.

“There’s nothing more I can tell you that you haven’t already read in the papers,” Mather was saying.

Conover flexed his beard and spoke, directly to Reve for the most part. “We’ve all watched a video at the station on ‘Surviving Edged Weapons.’ Cop in Houston with a stiletto in his ear, first two minutes of the film, ba da boom, ba da bing.”

Shustak wanted more. “You think he’s really cutting them up and cauterizing the wounds with acid...”

“Here.” Mather handed him a folded up copy of Daves’s C.A.P.S. report. “I didn’t give this, to you.”

“Of course not.” But he didn’t have a chance to read it, because at that precise moment a news van pulled up outside.

* * *

The blond newswoman stepped out of the side door of the network van as if she were a damsel in distress gingerly making an escape in any of the current slasher films. A dark-haired Mongoloid followed, minicam in hand.

A few of the street bums had gathered by the inside of the window as the crew set up their gear. An older woman with a fright-wig hairdo—several of the men knew her as Chiller Dihler from Decatur—waved to the camera as if they had already begun broadcasting. The newswoman was still having her face touched up, an assistant putting gloss over her lips.

“Cops are cynical,” Mather said to Shustak. “And right now we’re dealing with a guy who is just too smart for us.”

Too smart for you, maybe, partner mine, Conover was thinking, wondering what Reve’s titties looked like under that t-shirt.

The newswoman had dazzling blond hair and cheekbones that would make both men and woman cringe.

Warmed by a tan parka of which the collar fur blended in with just the slightest different hue with her hair, she thus had created an image of self-proclaimed lioness that had called a local Chicago network her territory for five years running.

She didn’t need to rehearse her lines. For she has said basically the same things, uttered the same sad lines, for the last five Christmas broadcasts. It was all filler shit, anyways. Good will toward fellow man and the more you stir it the better it sticks to the sides of the bowl. Eat, Drink, and Be Merry stories instead of the usual Beat, Drink, and Eat Mary stories. The newswoman thought of the latter as all the times she’s had to play sympathetic woman reporter talking to the rape victim at County, mulling over the victims of a rapid transit killer, etc., etc., and don’t it make the world go ‘round?

At least the Painkiller wasn’t genderizing his victims. Now that’s a detached, indifferent way of saying “killing women.” The newswoman closed her blue contact-lensed eyes and sang softly to relieve the tension. Hushabye, hushabye, little darling don’t you cry...

* * *

What about decoys?” Shustak had asked, to which Conover replied, “Like in cops?” As if the thought was unheard of in this, day and age.

“Or escorts, even,” Reve added. “Like they have for the nursing students at Rush-Presbyterian.”

Oh, I’d like to escort your mouth to my cock, Conover thought lewdly. Mather felt uncomfortable. He cleared his throat.

“The detectives at Homicide are knocking their, well, knocking their butts off on this. But it’s not Police Story, guys. I’m not sure what it is, but it’s not a cop show.”

As if to prove the point, at that moment, the news crew outside was getting word that the, Painkiller may have struck again in the West Loop.

* * *

“This is Clarice Grimaldi for WHHL News Radio 69. The so-called Painkiller may have found another victim...”

“…here on South Wacker Driver, where...”

“…near the Civic Opera House, where an empty wheelchair...”

The city was eating it up on a normally slow news day.

* * *

“...Melinda Chancelade at Area Four Homicide, speaking with Detective Lt. Jackson Daves of the Violent Crimes Unit.” The dark-haired woman thrust the microphone into Daves’s face, the big ball of foam with the news station’s emblem all but eclipsing the detective’s facial expressions.

“First off,” Daves rubbed his eyes. “Miss. I don’t think it’s right to jump to conclusions on this. What we have here is an empty wheelchair—”

“On Christmas Night.”

“Yes, on Christmas night That’s right. And that’s all we have.”

“No body, just like the others.” The woman, pressing on.

“Well, yes.” Daves felt like he was being interrogated by Joe Friday on Dragnet, although, today, Jack Webb’s character would be saying “Just the facts, ma’am.”

“Actually,” the newswoman seized the chance, “the Painkiller has always left a gruesome reminder, a piece of his victim, behind...” Daves scratched at his neck like a man in a commercial for throat lozenges. “So do you think that the Painkiller will strike again before the New Year?” Daves rolled his eyes heavenward and the station had to edit out his response.

* * *

Mather picked up the call on his radio. Daves wanted to get together with each cop that caught a murder, and most were on duty that night.

“Wants some brainstorming on this,” Mather told them. “The Loot’s getting heat from higher up.”

“Finally,” Reve said. “No disrespect.”

“None taken, babe.” Conover answered for his partner.

The four of them had walked over to the squad near the Tooker Place address, Shustak explaining that the cul-de-sac was named after Dr. Robert Newton Tooker, a founder of the Chicago Homeopathic Medial College and a professor of childhood diseases, when the blond newswoman walked up. Shustak had already put on his wrist braces and ski mask with the American flag stitched on the back.

Without benefit of her mike, she still made with a fighter’s stance, like she was poised to thrust an innuendo or forgotten memo into an indicted alderman’s face, and she spoke directly to Shustak.

The two cops left it alone, getting into their squad got them out of any further discussion.

“Crippled and insane, I am the American Dream,” Shustak said. “We are now on the trail of the city’s worst killer since the dreaded Eighth Street Man.”

“Riiiight.” She waited for any other response, preferably one from the cops. Then she shrugged it off and went back to her crew. Shustak got in the back next to Reve.

“Got rid of that nosy bitch,” Conover said, glad that Mather had let him bring the two in the back along. Man, he could look at her crotch all night long.

Shustak was looking out the window, down Tooker Place. A man fumbling with the door latch in a basement apartment. Familiar, in a hulking way.

The man turned away from the door, then turned back. Maybe he had seen the squad.

In the moment after he again turned away from the door, Frank Haid’s eyes met Evan Shustak’s. It may be that they recognized one another.

Chapter Thirty-Four

Frank Haid thought it best, as well as polite, to eat his Christmas dinner with the rotting corpse in Father’s bedroom.

“I really don’t, like it when you call me Madsen,” he said, poking at his dinner plate. “That was my mother’s maiden name. My name is Haid.”

He shovelled a forkful of hamburger into his mouth. Hunt’s catsup dripped from one tine as he removed the fork, still talking while he chewed.

“Father?” Haid wished that he could look into... look Vince Janssen straight in the eye. This, of course, was now an impossibility. “You know the boy who lives in that big townhouse, the crippled boy? Well, I’ll bet dollars to donuts that his mother is going to be out partying on New Year’s Eve!”

Haid was talking about Devin Verbeerst who suffered from Lesch-Nyhan. The twenty-year old shared an apartment on Elm Street with his mother, who worked one block over as a waitress on Rush Street.

“I know my mother used to abandon me, as well. Damn it, I know she was your sister.” He felt like flinging the fork at the torso. “But you’ve called her ‘tramp’ your share of times, Father. How many slits have you called ‘cunt’?”

The room was dimly lit: candles in hues of pale blue and baby-puke yellow played with the shadows of silver crucifixes on the oaken dresser, and on the wall with peeling wallpaper in an obsolete design from an obsolete decade.

Shadows teased at the silverfish and other things that crawled over the nearly-headless body of Vince Janssen. Father.

The way it happened, back in September, the incident involving the decapitation which left Uncle Vince’s chin jutting out like Kirk Douglas’s and gore dropping down over his lower lip like evil clown makeup: Janssen had been drunk to the gills, “feeling his Cheerio’s,” sitting there in his chair in the promise of evening. His rheumy eyes vaguely comprehending the Cubs losing to the phillies, cheering anything at all, even a commercial for kitchen cleanser, with the stumps of his legs.

Because his hands were wrapped tight around the bottle.

Contrary to Haid’s recurring dream, Vince Janssen had been discharged from the hospital minus his legs. The limbs were amputated from gangrene. More than one doctor over the years had said that the booze would kill him.

That had been in June. In July, he had fallen out of his Maxwell Street wheelchair and his right ear went through the grate of a floor fan. The beige frame of the fan still bore some of the dried blood spatters.

In September, that blood was the same color as the leaves outside. The two of them had been talking all that afternoon. Janssen might have been bending over with the dry heaves, or maybe just to let the sweat tall away from his, face. With Frank facing him, close enough to be touched, what happened next was Vince Janssen’s head first fell against Haid’s chest at nipple level, rippling his Ocean Pacific shirt, and then the head itself rippled as it fell into Haid’s chest.

Staring down without comprehension, a strange memory of firemen and girls with smiling eyelids wavered in his distant past. Haid heard his father gurgle something in those last seconds, but he would never sure what it had been his Father was trying to say.

Something cold against Haid’s bare skin, beneath his cream-colored tee. With slow realization Haid understood it to be Father’s lower lip brushing against his nearly hairless chest.

In those first days, with summer waning, Janssen’s consciousness slowly regained its voice. He knew that Frank would do anything to please Father.

In November, Frank Haid became a savior. To please Him.

* * *

Now, with Christmas dinner over, he led Father, and all the souls within him as well, in prayer. The psalm he had chosen to recite—from a new book, he didn’t know where he had lost the old one—was one of Compline, the last of the seven canonical hours.

The last prayer of the night, to be recited, after sunset. It should have been read on a Thursday, but you had to give him credit for trying, you really did.

He spoke to the empty room. Perhaps the silverfish breeding in the cavity of Janssen’s jawbone paused to listen. All God’s creatures, great and small.

PAST MERCIES INSPIRE HOPE FOR THE FUTURE.

Haid cleared his throat, the sound that of the rattling little ball inside a can of spray paint. This part always made him nervous.

Let the adversaries of my life be confounded and fail;

let them be covered with, confusion and shame who seek my ruin.

But I will always hope and

daily contribute to all thy praise.

My mouth shall tell of thy

justice, of thy help all the day

long: for l know not their number.

Haid paused then to admire with childlike wonder an illustration of Christ strumming a lyre. Maggots climbed over each other inside Father’s cheek.

I will tell them of thy might of

God, O Lord,

I will proclaim thy justice,

thine alone.

O GOD, forsake me not...

Thou hast laid many grievous trials

upon me: thou will restore me again and raise me from the depths of the earth... mylipsshallrejoice…my tongueshallspeakofjustice

alldaylonnnnnrtnnng,gggggg…

The words blended together at the end, melding into the only true meaning that they could possibly have, and Haid held that last syllable until it was no more than a humming in his nose.

He looked up at one of the crucifixes before speaking again. The silver cross was situated just above Father’s bottle of Glover’s hair tonic.

Everything he had said made sense, as if the apostles or’ whoever had written the Bible expressly for him. He imagined his palms bleeding between the lines of the psalm book. Written for him.

He finished with the only Kyrie Eleison he was ever able to memorize, “Glory be to The Father, and To The Son, and To The Holy Ghost.”

Haid crossed himself as the maggots made rustling sounds.

“As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.”

* * *

And now the hardest part.

Haid moved forward, reaching for the ruins of the corpse before him. He had long ago gotten used to the stench. The lower teeth were still intact, the lower lip withered.

Something scuttled away from Haid’s line of vision.

As he had done before, he peeled a thin rind of grayish skin from the lower portion of Father’s right cheek.

Placed it on his tongue and again gave the sign of the cross. Within him, he heard the words:

This is my body, given up for you.

Chapter Thirty-Five

Reve Towne was familiar with brainstorming from her days at the University of Illinois’s Polk Street campus, sitting in a semicircle with Professor Simmons tossing out a verb—usually to the blue-lipped Colleen Kimetyk, who he had a crush on—and from there a noun and from such things the great stories from the class of Fiction Workshop 102 were born.

Evan Shustak was familiar with his comic heroes’ monthly adventures, of Half-Century Man and Vestal Virgin sitting high in a Power City townhouse, discussing with Rodeo Clown and Chickweed the best way to confront the Original Sinner.

Brainstorming was something the Violent Crimes Unit did on those occasions when all sense had left the city.

Mather and Conover pulled into the deserted lot behind United of America on Haddock Place. There were two beat cars from the First that had made it there ahead of them, and nearby, Detective Remy Petitt’s ‘71 Dodge Polara. They met in Petitt’s and Daves’s favorite hangout, Loudon’s Dog Days, which was flush against Nolan Void’s.

“The band there is, this heavy metal babe group called The Widows of Whitechapel,” Conover tried to impress upon them. “Each one uses the name of one of Jack the Ripper’s victims.”

Shustak kept his eye on Conover with the secret intensity of examining a dark-haired woman on the bus without her knowledge, just out of curiosity to see if it was the shadowed curve of her skin or the beginnings of a moustache that he saw there.

Inside the dog joint, Daves passed out crisp folders to each cop.

“This is what we’re dealing with, people,” he said, rubbing his eye as if fighting the sandman and not fatigue.

“First off: Rizzi, Morisette, you know Contant here.” He then introduced the young cop to the others. Perry Contant had a sandy moustache and wore aviator-style prescription glasses.

“Loot, these two here are Reve Towne and Evan Shustak, they know a few people at that handicapped hotel on Randolph.” Conover stared at Reve too long while he introduced them, and Rizzi picked up on it.

“We met them the night before they found the woman’s remains,” Rizzi was blunt. “Just keep your eyes on the C.A.P. forms for awhile, okay, Louisville?”

He ignored Conover’s glare.

“Contant, here, and Ben Christopher aren’t directly involved when it comes to the killer’s victims, but they did find the dead rumdum on Salt Street, and we can at least discuss differences and shit like that there.” Daves shifted his butt cheeks. “You guys probably know Petitt here.”

He waited for the bald-headed, bearded detective to introduce himself. He wore a ten-gallon cowboy hat on his crack house busts, and everybody around the Grand Central District knew him as the Baton Rogue, a play on the town in Louisiana he was raised in.

“Christopher’s out of town this weekend,” Contant said.

“Dirty bird’s on one of those Carnival cruises,” Rizzi added.

“The Love Boat...” Contant sang off-key.

“You referring to the ship or to Ben?” Rizzi quizzed Contant on his partner’s girth.

“Guys.” Morisette said softly.

“Yea, we know,” Rizzi replied. “It’s Christmas and we’re here dealing with another serial killer, so we got to get what laughs we can early on.”

No one argued that point. Morisette and Mather had their own notepads out, and for all their joking, the others were skimming through the cream-colored folders Daves had circulated.

“Who’s first?” Daves said the word like a heartbeat.

“Think he’s gay?” From Morisette.

“All the victims are men, you mean?” Mather looked up from his notes.

“And the old woman, well. Mother image.”

“Good, Al,” Daves said. “Let’s drop names, faces, anything here, okay? Reve and Evan there, feel free.”

They talked well into the dawn.

* * *

From Stalking Sanity With The American Dream:

His Greatest Adventures by Reve Bega Towne, Annihilation Press, 1997.

PART THREE: GORY DAYS

It seems an eternity since that season of horror. The secret season, as one of my professors at the U of I wrote about once, where we all learned something about ourselves. Some of us learned too much. Or learned it too late, at the moment of their doom. Some couldn’t live with the knowledge, and others had no real choice.

That Christmas night when all the cops got together was incredible. Evan was virtually hyperventilating at the idea of the officers allowing him to air his opinions. Particularly, because he knew both Rizzi and Christopher in 1987, when both had laughed at him during his search for a cat burglar he referred to as The All-Nighter (see his notes entitled SMILE FOR THE WILD)..

Det. Lt. Daves ran through the list of authorities the C.P.D. had employed on the case. The case should have been referred to as Robert Dolezal—after the first serial victim—but, as the 1982 Quita McLean murder had been bastardized, again by the media, into the Rapid Transit murders, so it was that the folders he passed out simply read, in big block letters, PAINKILLER...

* * *

“Nice how the newsies jumped on what you said up on Wabash, Loot.” Shustak whispered to Reve that Rizzi was abbreviating the word lieutenant.

“Yea, sure.” Daves grunted like there was a golf ball in his throat. “Lotta good it’s done us so far.” He meant it hadn’t made the guy any cockier, giving him a villainous code name.

“I’m surprised it took tonight’s network circus to bring down the heat from City Hall,” Morisette said without a trace of weariness, his blue Pilot pen poised in his hand.

“Yea, well.” It was how Daves agreed with someone. “Seems like everybody’s a bit more concerned with the election coming up in February.”

“Think we’ll have a mayor we can call Junior?” Contant grinned.

“I don’t get it,” Petitt the displaced Southern rebel said, not knowing about Richard Daley Sr.

“I’ll explain after this mess is shut down,” Daves said.

“The election, plus the fact that the victims are, for the most part, homeless.” Rizzi scratched his gut.

“Bingo,” Daves pulled an imaginary trigger.

“Look how many times Gacy and Ayler were questioned by the force,” Shustak had the nerve to say. “All their victims were gay. Yet when Speck shot his wad, you’ll pardon my French, on eight nursing students from upper class families, boom. He’s picked up the same day and charged. Virtually. And pardon my grammar, too.”

The men had to smile.

“We got Gacy on a film receipt that his last victim had.” Contant had been working Uptown a decade back, with Sanford and Leland and Stormin’ Norman. “And Ayler never admitted to dismembering Donnie Bridges, even though he painted over the boy’s blood in his Albany Park apartment.”

“Guy who won forty million in the Lotto lived on the next block,” Rizzi added. This was true. A block away from a guy suspected in torture killing young boys in three states.

“I think the Painkiller is a whole new ballgame,” Daves said.

“What about this acid angle?” Morisette, always looking for more.

“The guy might work with chemicals Pazdra at County came up with a list of occupations where this kind of... of dissolving agent might be accessible. Bervid, the M.E., said that the anthro they brought in from Indy, that Williamson guy, he came up with a breakdown of the chemicals and trace substances found in the subway and on Wabash.”

“I met the guy, Loot,” Rizzi said. “Bastard at the Robert Taylor Homes fed his girlfriend’s baby some rat poison and tried to sue the dairy company.”

“Mother’s milk tastes better,” Conover winked at Mather.

“Can it, shitbird.” Daves said sharply. “Getting back to it, this acidic substance discolors the metal, but doesn’t eat into it.”

“Blows the theory about the blowtorch,” Rizzi said.

“Right,” Daves said. “The metal wasn’t even melted.”

“You’re pretty quiet, Petitt.” Conover piped up.

“Just thinking about what we’re dealing with here, is all,” the Southerner drawled.

“Don’t you mean who?”

“No, Conover,” Pettit said without sounding sarcastic. “I’m from this side of N’awlins, where they’s still tellin’ stories about the ‘Mormo. Swamp creature. No, sir, Patrolman Conover, I am talking about a what.”

Everyone was silent for a moment then.

* * *

FROM THE NOTEBOOK OF THE AMERICAN DREAM

25/6 Dec 88 (contd).

Music from Void’ds is to loud. So many things to register in my mind. Like how po Mather motions with his hands the way a chain smoker does. Conover strokes his face like a shrink. Daves the Lt. is so tired looking that I think of a Civil War Ghost. He is kind to let me write this don.

TO DATE: 30 sub. questioned?. NO NEED TO LIST. I know the face and the conversation in my head. So long Ago it seems.

FOR FUTURE USE:::

when tracking the dreaded Eighth Street Man...)

The police have consulted biorythym specialists, astrologers, and Darlanne Candel of the Behavoral Science Dept. at NW Univ in Evanston.

WOMAN named Vida Stonescu called police several times too tell Daves of a boy. She was nurse at Childermas Research where incidentally I went once or twice. Vida S. lives on Augusta and Wolcott. Daves mimicked her saying it “Aw-goose-ta” but without malice, only to ease the grim audience in attend.

Sd the woman taught boy bad burnned in school fire to walk again. Boy had NIGHTMARES of being CRIPPLED and In A Wheelchair!!!

Wrapped up with stairwell railings in firer?/Vida cant recall. Morisette (P0) is smart: recalls fire at St. Vitus in’ 1958. Winter Time.

The boy was saved but many were not.

* * *

“She told the story like this,” Daves had said, not wanting to tell them yet why the story had been finally dismissed into the cracker box. “Vida, then in her thirties, worked the rehab at the old hospital at 18th and Paulina. Childermas was one of the county clinics.”

“I know that place,” Contant said. “Had color-coded lines down the halls, told you where to go. Place smelled like Vaseline.”

“That was the burn ward you smelled,” Daves continued. “She worked with a Dr. Maclay on the kids brought in from that parochial school fire. Stonescu taught the victims how to use their limbs independently, you know, flex muscles and like that.”

“You’re thinking that—” Contant said.

“The killer might have—” Rizzi said.

“Wait.” Daves held up his hand. “This is where the story gets weird, and frankly leaves me leery about the whole thing. Said she saw him out in the courtyard with a dead bird in his hands.” Daves voice deepened, and his chin backed up into his neck, as if he were harboring a fugitive belch.

“Then the boy looked up to the sky and pushes the bird into his chest.”

“Messy.” Rizzi said.

“I don’t get it,” Conover said.

“No,” Daves said. “Into his chest. No more bird. Nada. Without a trace.”

“Maybe, this whole thing is crazy, anyways,” Morisette said, “but maybe she saw the kid put the bird in his jacket.”

“No dice, far as I can tell on that.” Daves said. “Vida said it was summer.”

“Chicago summers are like Baton Rouge winters,” Petitt pointed out.

“Still,” Daves replied.

“You know if she remembers the boy’s name?” Shustak cleared his throat to ask, surprising even Reve.

“It’s down in the folder, no. Guess it isn’t.” Daves riffled through his own notebook, “Here it is.

“Haid. Hayes. No, Haid,” He enunciated FRAN-sis MAD-sen HAYed. “Then, after that tale, we had a guy said it was a demon he called Fadeaway Charlie was behind it all.”

“That’s right up there with that independent North side paper saying that the Painkiller is the Tylenol killer come back,” Rizzi said.

“Surprised no one’s blamed it on Speck or Heirins,” Contant smiled.

None of them knowing how close they had come.

Chapter Thirty-Six

The American Dream found the woman’s name in the Ameritech white pages. No one answered the phone when he called. He let it ring ten times, in case she had arthritis or something. He then took the CTA to her building, the Damen Avenue bus dropping him off within blocks of her three-flat, and he stood around outside like a guy getting up the nerve to call a girl on the phone.

He hoped Reve could dig up something on the St. Vitus fire. In costume, he was secure and sure of himself. Like the Division Street drunks who were sleeping it off or the Washington Square junkies who were getting it on, he was feeling no pain.

* * *

From the Patrol Log of The American Dream:

Tuesday 27 Dec 88. 1130AM next to impossible to find this woman. Hoping Reve for better luck. Slight envy for Vic Tremble him having family at this time of year.

My only family =

the family of man

IN A TIRED CITY!!!

11:5 am Bus on State. Resting now. Meeting Reve at the Marclinn 12 on the button.

* * *

“Had to stop at a Burger King to blow my nose,” The American Dream told Reve. “Couldn’t wait; runny nose, it gets in your cowl. In the summer you smell everyone’s sweat. In the winter, you smell your own snot.”

The two sat in the lobby of the Marclinn, and Reve was wondering for the hundredth time if she was fascinated by Evan Shustak simply because she wanted to write about him one day.

“Couple things, Ev,” she touched his arm lightly.

“Had no luck at all finding that woman,” he said.

“That’s okay, listen. I went to the lib—no, I want to say this first. I ran into Slappy Vander Putten on the corner. He said some of the guys have been talking about moving out, maybe going back to the South side.”

“Perhaps they are thinking that the Painkiller is a cowardly white man and would be too scared to attack someone on South Drexel Boulevard.”

“I think what he means, Evan, is that the killer is using The Loop as a means of convenience. People caught up in workday rituals who could care less about saving someone, or seeing something, if it means missing their train.”

“They just don’t see it,” The American Dream said. “The world is in a state of constant change. My uniform will be my shroud as the next generation builds from my bones.”

“Cool down, Evan. Let me finish.”

“Sure, Reve. Sorry.” He came short of hanging his head.

“Slappy also told me that Vic came up with the same ideas you had on decoys.”

“Victor is back downtown?”

‘“No, this was a few days ago or something. Slappy said that Mike was still out of it on Christmas morning.”

“You know,” The American Dream said, looking off into space for a moment. “I could get in touch with Ben Murdy. He has friends with polio. He’ll know where we can pick up some used chairs.”

“Think Vic will go along?”

“We both had the same idea, right?”

“Yea.” Reve never gave any thought that Shustak was talking about the two men going out on decoy without telling the police. She was more excited about what she told him next.

“Listen, this is what I found at the library.” She beamed as she pulled a sheaf of photocopies out of her bag. “Check this out. It’s from LIFE magazine, the week after.”

The American Dream looked down at the Dec. 15, 1958 issue of the tabloid magazine. A black and white photograph dominated the page. A fireman cradling a boy in his arms.

The boy could have been alive or dead. His hair was almost completely burned away. The fireman looked like a medic in a war, his face twisted in pain.

The caption read: His face twisted in grief, Fireman Thomas Schmidt, himself the father of two, carries Francis Haid, age 9, from the still-burning fire.

Francis Haid.

CHICAGO SCHOOL FIRE TAKES 98 LIVES

ANGUISH THE NATION SHARES

Francis Haid.

The American Dream hurriedly told Reve, like a stoolie blurting out a confession before the brass knuckles are swung, about what he had seen on Christmas Eve. The man at the Tooker Place apartment, the exchanged glances, the conversation with the newswoman.

“I’ve seen his face around State Street, too.” He added.

Reve would remember later how she was thinking things were going too fast when Rizzi and Morisette came through the front doors.

“Figured we’d see one of you here,” Rizzi did the talking. “We got a call from D.D. Latent prints on that wheelchair out by the Opera House.”

“Matched through Army records,” Morisette finished. “Reve, Evan. The prints matched those of Michael Surles.”

* * *

They all felt the dead space in their bones. Twenty minutes had passed when Victor Tremulis stormed through the doors. Mike Surfer’s name was on every radio newsbreak by now.

“...can’t believe.. .wouldn’t KNOW THE MAN WASN’T AROUND FOR CHRIST SAKES!” Shouting like a psycho on a bank heist.

“Vic,” Reve ran up to touch his shoulders. “No one noticed he was gone. Everybody here was thinking he was in his room, like he had been for two weeks. Didn’t answer the door when he was in there.”

“Had been.”

“What?”

“Had been for two weeks.” Tremulis backed away from her. “Reve, Mike Surfer’s dead. The Painkiller got him.”

Reve winced.

No one talked. No one shot pool. Etch and Szasz and Karl sat on the couch like those three monkeys that saw, heard, and spoke no evil. Colin Nutman wiped imaginary dust from the front desk.

* * *

The three of them sat in Loudon’s Dog Days, drinking large Cokes. Tremulis had just told the others that, since there was no body, maybe Mike Surfer wasn’t dead.

“We talked to Morisette,” Reve said. “Said as far as he knew from the preliminaries in Forensics, none of that acid compound was found.” He pulled the dog-eared C.A.P. report from his pocket after Tremulis gave him a questioning look.

“What…what if Mike just wanted to be left alone and went off by himself?” Reve knew there was no chance of that.

“He wasn’t going to crawl, that’s for sure.” A teenager behind him was playing a Walkman too loud and he wanted to tell her to turn the fucking thing down because he’d never have the satisfaction of seeing her go deaf at an early age.

“Mike’s dead, Reve.” The American Dream said. “We know it and he knows it.”

Tremulis wanted to ask him if, when he said he, did he mean the Painkiller, or Mike Surfer.

Reve was thinking that Evan had meant that God knew that Mike Surfer was dead.

They were both right...

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Father Dennis finished reciting his breviary and walked out to the pulpit. None of the other Franciscans spoke to him much these days, not even the newest of the flock, Father Gary. Even Gary—ah! his innocence, like a freshman in college, eager to believe chapter-for-worse that Moby Dick and The Scarlet Letter were the two finest pieces of literature written past, present, and future.

They all knew his heart wasn’t in it anymore. His mannerisms, his comparisons, well, may God help him. No exclamation point, just a half-hearted attempt at a period. His breviary lacked soul.

And the silence disturbed him. Silence in the pews, because people were staying off the streets. The people who needed the church for shelter, that is. Father Dennis fully expected each winter’s headlines to be brimming—sometimes sensational, most times as filler—with items about frozen carcasses, vagrants who allowed alcohol to thin their blood a bit too much. Vagrants who then found themselves dead, with the police finding them propped up like bookends on Grant Park benches. He also thought about bag ladies at St. Anthony’s, praying that only half their blackened fingers need be amputated.

Now that entire mess was overshadowed by a greater evil, one he felt kin to. Who didn’t want to end suffering in this profession? What had he become? Pray that their suffering was quick.

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

He looked at the upcoming January First prayer.

EPIPHANY

OPENING PRAYER

Let us pray

(that we will be guided by the light of faith)

Father,

you revealed your Son to the nations

by the guidance of a star.

ALTERNATIVE OPENING PRAYER

Let us pray

(grateful for the glory revealed today through God made man)

Father Dennis wished he could weep.

* * *

Nick Desmond was sitting at the door of Murdy’s, his tired face washed in holiday colors, the front window being lighted with bulbs that were mostly the color of chili peppers. The bartender’s eyes were pinned by the off-red light. Still, it was the most festive atmosphere on the entire block, the entire neighborhood. Maybe things were different on the Gold Coast and thirty stories upward, but this was North Wabash, and the temperature outside was ball-shriveling. The entire month there had been little snow for what little sun there was to reflect heat off of. Maybe, with the Seeberg juke playing the same lonely drunks’ lonely songs again and again, maybe Nick Desmond’s heart was shriveled up as well.

Unlike owner Ben’s sister bar, M.C.’s, up near Diversey Parkway, Murdy’s was a straight bar that catered to the encyclopedia salesmen or conventioneers that often invaded the Allerton or the Delaware Towers.

Dion was singing if anybody here had seen his old friend John when the three of them came in, Tremulis holding the door open for Reve and looking like a happy puppy. Reve was wearing cream-colored leg warmers over her jeans, yet there were no whistles from the tables, no turned heads at the bar. One guy in a polyester suit did try bobbing for cheese curls, though. It was that kind of night.

Dion, evidently out of touch for quite some time now, asked if anybody here had seen his old friend Bobby. Tremulis wondered what pair of eyes in the Christmas-colored shadows had played the song. The whole time they talked to Desmond, with Shustak strangely silent through it all, he kept thinking about how large the bartender’s nose was. Maybe he did coke.

Seems Murdy was out of town, the diminutive man had left for sunny L.A. to test shoot a Jay Tarses pilot. Dabney Coleman running a collection agency in Miami, with Murdy as a process server. When Desmond returned to the bar to serve a customer and Shustak excused himself to go to the bathroom, it was then that Tremulis had his only real talk with Reve Towne for the duration of their relationship.

Chuck Berry lamented for Nadine. A beer glass overturned to a smattering of applause.

“There but for the grace...” Reve said. “That’s why Evan is so quiet. He hates drunks. And junkies. The only pain they’ll ever feel, physically, is from withdrawal.”

“He makes me feel guilty,” Tremulis said.

“Why?”

“Reve, I just feel that I can’t possibly live up to what he is. And I can’t help but blame myself, I know that sounds stupid, will sound stupid, I mean, that Mike is gone, and, like how I have this shitty attitude sometimes—”

“Lot of people hold things in all the time, Vic.” Reve’s brow was creased. “I do. You’re in the majority.” She touched his hands then. Her flesh weighed down upon him like concrete. The girl with the concrete hands.

“Wish my folks would understand that,” he snorted. “Yea, that’s me, living at home”.

They both stopped talking as their companion returned. Shustak sat down, fumbled in his coat pocket for a pill capsule and rolled it into his mouth on his tongue. Trernulis thought of a kid from when he was in high school caught smoking a doobie in the guy’s john, and how he was able to conceal the fact. Shustak informed them that he didn’t want to chance dropping the pill on the dirty tiles of the bathroom.

“Tylenol,” he explained further.

There was an awkward silence for a moment. Tremulis thought of how his mother dry-swallowed three Excedrins first thing every morning. For the caffeine kick, ever since he was a kid. Then bitch at him after she took another three during Search For Tomorrow, or the weekend installment of Lamp Unto My Feet. Then he thought of how little he knew of Reve, how little she knew of him.

They would have to remain strangers, run the road of their days together in parallel lanes, as would the killer to the girl next door. To collide would be paralytic. What would she think, what could she think, if he described her imaginary deformities. Neck tumors to be lapped at when a more skillful suitor would settle for a hickey.

What would she think of the self-mutilations that gave him succor in the cold nights?

Gene Vincent sang on about the man who shot Liberty Valance, and that lawman, the bravest of them all, was evidently in the bar.

Someone cheered at the chorus, at any rate.

Tremulis noticed that Shustak’s eyes looked jellied as he slapped his fingers against his pant leg. The cold stiffened his joints as well. Looking at Reve—What the hell was he doing still here in Chicago? Living like the fugitive. In a Quinn-Martin production. Roll the commercial about the laxative.

Or let Victor Tremulis AKA Vic Tremble just keep on running.

Surely Reve saw Shustak’s vacant stare. Understood the concentration behind it, as the man dug with spastic care into his pocket for that elusive other Tylenol. Tremulis read a sign for a comedy team that called themselves Mitch Flotsam & Max Jetsam, playing The Funny Firm that same night, the 29th of December. Behind the bar, he saw something that looked like a revolving ferris wheel. Wilted hot dogs hung from metal prongs like bloated condoms. He was vaguely aware that Reve had asked him something.

“—can’t your family accept your problems.” He missed the first part and couldn’t tell if she had asked a question or made a statement.

Shustak was making a sucking sound as he dry-swallowed his bitter pill and why didn’t he just get something to drink? Because it was better discipline. Like masturbating with a gym sock on was better discipline. Or nicking his eyelids with a razor blade. He had done that the night of his tenth high school reunion. “They know I have spasms,” he said, diving in and hoping it made sense. “They just try to ignore them, thinking that I could do that—put them out of my mind—if it was what I truly wanted.”

The grin of pain was great as he said this, and Reve would remember that Cheshire cat grin for as long as she lived, especially after what happened later. It was a smile you got by merely thinking of where it hurt, the sensation, like how she flinched at a girl getting her breasts kneaded in a horror film whose ending was apparent even as the opening credits rolled.

Thirtysomething and living at home with his parents because he felt himself a prisoner of his own body. They both thought of this simultaneously, and both with a different degree of conviction to their emotion.

Reve saw so much in the men she’d met this past year and a half. Trying not to smile, because it would certainly be misconstrued, Reve thought of an old song by Mike Douglas, the talk show host, of all people. “The Men In My Little Girl’s Life.”

Dad, there’s a boy outside, his name is Rod.

He wants to play in our backyard. Can he, Daddy?

Shustak, saner than most, but driven by the pain to the fringe. Tremulis’s own guilt at not living up to the pain threshold others have expected of him. Mike Surfer, as cyclothymic as the rest. Dead or alive, how did the human race get to the point where they could be so intimate and yet distant in the same breath? Everyone at the Marclinn had accepted Mike’s disappearance like a gaggle of clinicians at Our Lady of Lost Causes.

“Hyperactive,” Tremulis told the two who knew him as Tremble. “That’s what they used to call it when I was a kid, always slapping the fridge or screen door shut. That just keyed me up more. Always telling me to slow down, like that would solve everything since birth. I was forever spilling my milk. . .”

“Your dad was like this, too?” Reve asked.

“My father said I did things like I had a candy asshole.”

“I don’t remember my parents, at all.” Shustak said without further explanation. Tremulis assumed Reve knew the full story.

“Sometimes,” he continued, “sometimes my father called me a holy terror, back when I was a kid.”

“Speaking of terrors,” Shustak’s voice rasped from swallowing the tablets dry. “Haid’s never been here, I asked Desmond on the way back from the bathroom. But he has seen him around Washington Square.”

“How can he be sure?” Reve asked.

“Reve, for as many ravers who gargle with the twilight, there seems to be only one who has shouting matches with the Lord.” Shustak told them of how Desmond overheard the man’s ramblings one night before Halloween. “Plus, he’s always crossing himself. Haid, I mean.”

Reve summed it up best, talking about the Painkiller, not Haid, and Dion again asked somebody, anybody, if they’d seen his best friends John, Bob, Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, and Sacco and Vanzetti, as well.

“Like he’s the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.”

“Or judge, jury, and executioner,” Tremulis said.

And the lonely drunks played their melancholy songs, their worlds revolving like the black discs with the bright but faded labels.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Later, Haid would think back on it ironically.

He’d think on how, if he had been asked by anyone who had told him to take the boy, he would only be able to reply in one way.

He’d have to say: did it In The Name Of The Mother. And leave it at that.

* * *

It was eleven o’clock on New Year’s Eve, and he stood outside the townhouse where Devin Verbeerst lived. This far north it was called Dearborn Parkway, and most of the buildings had wrought iron gates surrounding tiny front yards and walkways.

The gates had buzzers affixed, and one had to be buzzed to enter. Unless the gate happened to be broken, as the one to 1111 was. Vince Janssen had known the widow Verbeerst during his life, and he knew that the gate had long been broken.

The white labels next to the buzzer read:

Gerberding

Osier

Verbeerst

Mother and son lived on the third floor. From the way Father had spoken of her, the widow Verbeerst, would certainly be away from the apartment this night.

Devin Verbeerst was twenty-four years old and suffered from Lesch-Nyhan disease. Haid walked through the lobby door without looking back. The disease struck only males, and caused them to be self-destructive. They had to be strapped into their chairs. Devin’s front teeth had been pulled after he had bitten through the skin of his upper lip. The apartments on the first two floors were quiet.

The widow Verbeerst had told Father that the worst thing about her son’s disease was that he knew too much. Haid used another bit of Father’s knowledge to jimmy the door to #3F open. Fast and fluid. To the left of the doorway was the kitchen, to the right, the living room. He saw a flicker from the television screen, and a distorted shadow of a wheelchair against the wall and ceiling.

He had been ready -- oh Christ! he had been ready—but the sight of the crippled man before him made Haid expel his breath. The living room was dark, the sole illumination came from the black and white RCA television against the west wall. A Marx Brothers movie was on. Channel Nine always played Marx Brothers movies on New Year’s Eve. A clock above the television read 11:27. He was going to have to move, to shake the sadness from his brain.

The shadows flickering in mad pavanes across Devin’s face provided the initial shock. The gaps where his teeth had been pulled made him resemble a cackling, drooling old hag. The Witch Queen of New Orleans. On the screen, Groucho said something funny to a group of socialites. Devin muttered something, it might have been a laugh. A minute passed. Harpo honked his horn.

Pulling his upper gums across his lower lip, Verbeerst watched the movie in honest rapture. Haid could see three pillows in the boy’s lap. A childhood memory of “The Princess And The Pea.” From beneath the pillows, he saw a tube running from the boy’s abdomen to an opaque, quivering bag near the center of the wheelchair’s right tire. The tube was spattered on the insides. Haid thought of Father’s snuff bowl. A commercial came on the television, and Cellozi and Ettleson told you about their auto dealership, “where you always save more money.”

Haid now stood before the crippled form of Devin Verbeerst. His eyes adjusted slowly to the things in the room beyond the television’s light. There was darkness in the other rooms of the apartment, only a night light above the kitchen sink glowed amber. Like a faraway beacon on Lake Michigan.

He looked down at the boy, his ankles tied to the ankle rests. Haid bent over and lifted the first pillow, then the next. The movie came back on. He placed the third pillow on the floor with the others.

And looked into Devin’s hazel eyes. The boy tried to speak. Clucking noises came out of his mouth along with the drool. Haid moved closer. Then, Devin surprised the holy hell out of him by speaking, slurring his words no worse than a working man who had stopped off for a few beers.

He said: “Will it go on forever?” With the last word coming out like fowewer. But Haid understood.

He couldn’t answer yet. Instead, he focused on the shelf behind the boy. At the boxes on the shelf. A Batman and Robin Colorform. A box of Lincoln Logs. Games like Ker-Plunk and Head Of The Class. Bought before he contracted the disease, to be sure. Will it go on forever?

“No,” he finally answered.

And Devin Verbeerst let loose with a low, ululating moan. Without the pillows’ support, his palsied head flung forward, smashing into Haid’s chest. Verbeerst gummed at Haid’s jacket.

The suede of the jacket shushed as Haid reached his arms around the boy. He pressed his palms into the flesh of the boy’s neck, the knob of his spine.

Under the flesh.

Haid took a deep breath. This was always the most difficult part.

“God wants you home. . . Son.”

The boy’s moan was cut off like a set of headphones being slammed shut.

* * *

He allowed himself a fresh breath. When he looked up and saw the widow Verbeerst staring at him, he thought that his heart was going to explode.

How much did she see? She stood there in the light of the bathroom, the light he missed, damn it. A portrait of impassivity, a woman in a simple white nightgown, no more than forty, not caring that her legs were apart and the light was behind her.

He did not speak. Her eyes bore no questions. The seconds grew heavier, unbearable.

He saw her gaze shift to a point beyond him. Haid turned and saw a photo of Devin in a Little League outfit. There was a dark patch of dirt on the red-and-white pinstriped uniform. The exact spot where, years later, a colostomy bag tentacled out of his abdomen.

The woman, Devin’s mother. She had spoken something, softly. It had sounded like...

It had sounded like she had said...Go.

Sounds from the other room…the bedroom? He spoke towards the hallway. “I’ve saved your son.”

He walked towards the bedroom, saw the woman with her face buried in a pillow. A lamp was on next to the phone, she had not called

911. Thank God for that. She weeped in small whimpers. “I said, I saved your son.” She continued sobbing, louder now.

He walked swiftly to the front door then, feeling dizzy. The last sight of the woman was that of the calloused soles of her bare feet as she lay prone on the bed. Was the crying an act, for when she phoned the police? She would certainly phone the police, wouldn’t she?

Go. She had told him to go. He was sure of it.

He left before the sirens came, if they would ever come, remembering the soles of the widow Verbeerst’s feet. And the photo that maybe had made her final decision.

Haid would remember the smiling face in the Little League uniform for as long as he lived.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Tremulis met up with Reve and Shustak at Navarro’s, a bookstore at 2909 North Broadway. Murdy’s bar, M.C.’s, was down the block at 2850 North. It was Friday, the 6th of January, 1989.

When he stepped off the No. 36 bus, he looked down at the wet pavement, where the little snow they had gotten the evening before had melted overnight. With no wind, the temperature actually climbed overnight. A looming apartment building on Oakdale reflected the sidewalk at his feet. A giant El Marko proclaiming to anyone who cared YOU ARE HERE.

The temperature was still in the thirties, the sun bright, and so Tremulis was unzipping his grey jacket even as he opened the door to the bookstore. A little bell jingled like a memory in an insane person’s head.

Shustak was wearing his Hell’s Kitchen sweatshirt over black cords. He carried a pea green jacket folded over into one fist. Reve was wearing a blue blouse, black skirt, and black boots. Stylish enough that he hardly noticed the limp caused by the metal plate in her hip.

She was holding a copy of the new Zen bestseller by Daemon Winter-Boston, and handed it to him at his request. He again marveled and fell in love with her unpolished fingernails. He wanted to flaw the people and things he let enter his world, and’ mutilate himself in the name of self -knowledge, but he felt the stirrings of his weak heart only when the woman of his immediate desires—it hadn’t always been Reve Towne—was not hiding behind makeup.

The page flipped open to a quote by Heraclitus:

Everything flows.

Tremulis thought of things that flowed. The Chicago River, acetic acid, blood, piss...

Shustak bought nothing. “I read faces,” he told the girl at the cash register even though she didn’t ask.

* * *

This, then, was M.C.’s: wedged between the Broadway Surf garage and Sammon Studios, a video company, the black and pink and chrome two-story building was a far cry from the other gay bars in the North Halsted neighborhood like Christopher Street and Eric’s.

In Ben Murdy’s own words: “M.C.’s is a semi-high tech video dance bar, and I pride myself that the music we play is not so loud ‘that customers can’t talk below a scream.”

Six years ago, the bar had been Absinthia’s, a real shot and a beer joint with hairbag customers. The only thing Murdy kept when he took over the bar was the white canopy front. Across the street were the Green Briar and Commodore apartment buildings. In the twenties, the latter was the site of Al Capone’s mistress, who lived in the penthouse. The suite still rented at twenty-one hundred a month. An escape tunnel between the two buildings ran underneath Surf Street. The Biograph Theater was flashing its marquee a few blocks north, with the Red Lion’s mute colony directly across the street.

Tremulis sat with Reve and Shustak, at a table facing the many television screens above the bar, each showing a music video. The Bauhaus’s “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” was currently being viewed by a dozen men, most with less than rapt attention. The bar covered half the length of the downstairs along the north wall. The top of the bar was polished black, the bottom was glass blocks lit from behind.

Upstairs was a small grey bar and a raised dance floor. The three of them could hear Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family” whenever one of the bouncers opened the door at the top of the stairs. The bouncers all had receding hairlines like Hulk Hogan and wore wing-tipped tuxedo shirts over black slacks with pink or turquoise bow ties. Tremulis felt very uncomfortable when a few glances were made in his direction.

Evan sat directly underneath a Warhol print of Murdy, done in electric blues and greens, and, compliments of the house, was sipping a Canada Dry. Tremulis sat to his right, facing the bar and the video screens, and had a Bacardi rum and Coke, overly conscious of the men possibly finding him attractive because his hairline matched those of the muscular bouncers. Reve contented herself with a Gilbey’s gin and tonic.

“Hi, guys,” Ben Murdy waved the hand that held a Carlton 100 Menthol halfway through its brief life. Animated was the best way the man could be described. A year older than Tremulis, he moved with the strange synchronicity that befell the characters in The Wizard of Oz, any of them. Taller than a Munchkin, Murdy moved with the gentle grace of either Judy Garland or Ray Bolger, and his wicked, rapier wit was old man Wizard himself.

He sat in the chair opposite Reve and was dressed in a pair of acid-washed jeans more black than blue topped by a black t-shirt that read “I’m O.K. You’re an asshole”. For his stature, his firm chest and compact arms would be, in the North Halsted vernacular, to die for. He exhaled his smoke before sitting down, half-straddling the chair.

“Your hair looks lighter,” Shustak said.

“Life’s a bleach and then you dye,” Murdy said as if Evan was his first straight man ever. In a manner of speaking. One of the bouncers overheard him and groaned. Another lamented, “Always a blond,” and shook his head in a contrived way.

“Actually,” Murdy said. “It didn’t lighten up from the sun quote unquote in Celluloid City. I mean, get this. I’m out there at this big, you know how it is, posh party out somewhere on Beverly Glen, near where Harry Hamlin lives and this... this shmuck from Central Casting, he’s smashed, says to me, he says that Danny DeVito could do the thing better, you do know I was out there for that Tarses thing?” He paused without taking a drag off of his menthol.

“Desmond said,” Reve answered, transfixed.

“Anyways. Oh, hell, anyways. Geena Davis dyed my hair right there because we were both bored.” He waved the rest of the story. Tremulis heard a bass pattern from upstairs that he felt in his ears like a bleeding hematoma.

“So you’re going after that horrid Painkiller.” The statement, the abrupt change in both subject and expression, jarred the three of them. Shustak jostled his drink.

“Yes,” he said. “We know who he is.”

“We think,” Tremulis added because it was true.

“Listen to me, will you?” Murdy said. “I’m still talking in LaLa-ese. I said the word ‘horrid’. Sorry.” His cigarette was out. “Cutting down,” he said aloud, as if having second thoughts in his mind. Shustak ordered another Canada Dry. The waiter brought one of each for everyone and a dry vodka martini with two olives for Murdy.

He sipped at it, unconsciously tonguing the inner part of his upper lip. Tremulis caught a glimpse of the blue vein on the underside of the man’s tongue and looked back into his own drink.

Shustak was telling Murdy that he had a new phrase he was going to try out on street scum one day.

“I’m a new drug. Try me.”

“I like it, I like it.” Murdy said with a large amount of gleefulness.

* * *

The night wound on like the subway eternal, Tremulis getting just enough hooch in his system to think that maybe he could get a hard on if he squeezed his eyes shut for about a billion seconds.

Murdy told them that his friend Milton Castle from up around Bowmanville could get them some used wheelchairs. Tremulis excused himself to go to the bathroom. Why the hell was Murdy going along with Shustak’s fantasy? he thought. Maybe he was angry, too, because gays are lumped into the same old category as cripples. If the Painkiller was out doing them, the city would blame it on their promiscuity, like they do AIDS...

But wasn’t catching the Painkiller his fantasy, as well?

Just what the hell were they supposed to do if the Painkiller did approach them with his toolbox of cutting things? Make the sign of the cross? Blow him away? Run him down?

He had finished pissing; and now stood there staring at his limp dick. A machine above the urinals sold Mentor condoms. Someone had written in marker on the white machine,”It’s all in the wrist, with a deck or a cue.” Tremulis recognized the Nelson Algren epithet.

He knew he was doing all of this for one reason. To impress Reve. He shivered at the thought. He zipped up and went back to the table.

To Reve.

Knowing that the only wet spot he would ever sleep on would be from his own blood.

Chapter Forty

Lights Out at the Marclinn, Tremulis thought.

The lobby was empty. As if he and Shustak had walked into the waiting room of a hospital on a slow night. Nutman was there at the desk, but he was sleeping. On Insomniac Theater, Channel Seven’s late night movie theme, Zombies On Broadway was replaced by first a commercial for a lawyer who took the sting out of bankruptcy, and then one for girls like Cheryl, who are just waiting for your call on the 900 party line in your area.

They had seen Reve into a cab and her Ohio Street apartment destination, and both were now happy to be in warmth again. How someone like Blackstone Shatner could live on the street, Tremulis would never know. Times like this, he didn’t know why he’d ever thought the life of a street person could possibly be glamorous. His fingers were like twigs, and it felt like somebody was sticking a spade underneath his left shoulder blade and getting a good bit of leverage.

God knew how Shustak was feeling.

* * *

It had worn her down, the day, what lay ahead, everything. Reve Towne was dead on her feet. It was a small studio she’d lived in’ these past three years, in the Grand Ohio Apartments. The entire building looked to be built like a miniature Amtrak train, but her landlords, the Bartolis, were good people.

She was too tired to even put on her cassette player. Roxy Music usually dissolved her waking moments. Reve undressed as she walked over to the Murphy bed, unmade going on four days now. Didn’t listen to her answering machine, like anybody was hiring freelancers in the post-holiday lull and they were all trying to reach her! The money from her student loans would last her through the summer, and she was still tossing around the idea of writing stories about’ Evan as The American Dream and mailing them off to Peggy Nadramia at Grue Magazine in New York.

In white panties and an olive t-shirt, she dug her toes into the garish red shag carpeting of the living room as if it were a new thing, installed just that very afternoon. She swayed back and forth, as if The Diamonds were playing “The Stroll” just for her.

After a moment of this, she fell into the bed, for it was too warped to fall onto. And while others counted sheep or sexual conquests, imagined or otherwise, Reve counted the titles of...the books she might one day write.

LEAN CANDLES IN BRITTLE TOWNS: the serial killer in America today.

SPECKulations: Richard Speck’in his own words and some that aren’t.

STALKING SANITY WITH THE AMERICAN DREAM: A Life In Progress.

Could she ever write about the Painkiller? Or Vic Tremble? This she doubted, because that would mean revealing too much about herself.

The room smelled of cedar blocks and O’Boise’s potato chips. Reve was asleep in minutes. Victor Tremulis would be aroused by the knowledge that she snored through her nose.

* * *

Evan Shustak lay on a cot near Tremulis. In the faint light bleeding from the Magikist lips across Randolph Street, the man with a passion for self-mutilation considered his surroundings.

On a small valet between the two cots, Tremulis saw the glint of a plastic Illinois Disabled I.D., a. few coins, a few pills. Pink and elongated. The coins were copper, and looked like drops of blood from the red lips flashing across the street.

On the wall was a creased poster of Superman reminding everyone that 1981 was The Year of The Disabled. Next to that, held in place by a blue tack, was a recruitment flyer for the Chicago Chapter of the Guardian Angels. And a lobby poster for Attack of the 50-foot Woman, for cry-eye.

He looked over at Shustak, who was whispering his nightly prayers. His own prayers to The Givers of Pain and Rapture included the invocation of “bless my family and friends that I might take away their pain.”

He looked back around the room.

The floor was cluttered with portions of fiberglass casts and limb braces, rolls of gauze, empty prescription bottles and boxes of Band-Aids. All part of The American Dream’s, what, inventory? Disguises? Who really knew?

Below the cot Tremulis lay on were Shustak’s comic books. Green Lantern and T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents, the 50s Prize Frankenstein books by Dick Briefer. Phantom Lady and The Holy Terror, these from the late 40s, the former always using her blackout powers, the latter enigmatically saying “This is my body,” or, “Thou shalt have no gods,” before bashing someone’s head into a pulp.

Shustak had explained to him that he had received the valuable books from Barry Allen Bonasera, the owner of All-American Comics. Shustak had somehow stopped a robbery in progress, but Bonasera was still grateful enough to part with his back stock.

Tremulis thought of Reve again, of how he sputtered a quick goodbye earlier that night. Maybe Christmas and New Year’s 1989 would be better for both of them. All three of them.

“I’ve been intimate with Reve.” Shustak’s whisper shocked him. He thought he had spoken the fantasy words himself.

“What?” he said, trying to make it sound less desperate than it was.

“Yes,” Shustak spoke straight up at the ceiling. “She has seen me without my arm braces on.”

* * *

Shustak then returned to his own thoughts before sleeping. Tonight, The American Dream was gunned down in the Van Buren corridor, beneath the El tracks.

But he had fought the good fight. Never to have to wake up again.

Not ever.

Thus was he assured of a restful sleep.

Chapter Forty-One

That same night, Father’s voice insisted that, for whatever reason, Frank Haid turn the wheelchair around that the headless corpse might view the black and white picture of John F. Kennedy above the Glover’s tonic and Sloan’s Liniment bottles.

Haid spent several futile moments trying to pry Father’s rotting hands away from the wheelchair armrests without breaking the fingers off. Finally, he stepped around behind the chair, like giving the corpse a surprise bear hug, and tried not to think of the things crawling in Father’s throat cavity.

Then, he prayed.

My Jesus have mercy on the Soul of JOHN FITZGERALD KENNEDY.

Incline Thine ear, O Lord, unto our prayers, wherein we humbly pray to show Thy mercy upon the soul of Thy servant JOHN, whom thou has commanded to pass out of this world, that Thou wouldst place him in the region of peace and light, and bid him be a partaker with Thy Saints. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.

Haid liked the way whom Thou hast commanded sounded, but after Father made him recite the obituary psalm twenty-five times, because Kennedy deserved to be remembered, the hulking man broke down in tears of fatigue.

Chapter Forty-Two

Ben Murdy was having trouble acquisitioning the used wheelchairs, but assured Evan Shustak that he would have them by the end of the next week. Shustak wasn’t concerned at the delay, there was plenty to do as The American Dream. Priority was checking on the Painkiller’s possible haunts.

So it was that he stood in the north side alley, freezing his ass off along with Vic Tremble. It was Saturday night, the seventh of January. The garbage cans around them were brimming with discarded Christmas detritus: brittle trees, broken bulbs, and dozens of cards filled with holiday news already forgotten.

“I don’t follow you on what exactly it is we are doing in this alley.” Tremble was the first to speak after long moments of teeth-chattering silence.

The halogen lighting of the alley that ran behind Eugenie Street like a hairline fracture caused both mens’ faces to take on a freakish pall. The American Dream was wearing a cream-colored ski mask as part of his costume. When he passed beneath an apartment building’s shadow, as they continued west, the blackness advanced over the Dream’s face like cancer in bone tissue.

“Besides getting dirt and shit all over our jackets—”

“I’m wearing my armor,” the Dream said. “As you well know.”

“Yea, right. Right.” Tremble muttered this as a drop of numbing water fell from a pipe overhead and hit him high on his right cheekbone. “But you still haven’t answered my question.”

“If Frank Haid is the Painkiller,” the American Dream spoke in a monotone and scratched his right wrist brace, “and we are both dead certain that he is, from what the homicide detective Daves told me, he’s most likely going to be afraid of women...”

“A little clichéd, don’t you think?”

“Vic, our very existence is a cliché,” the Dream said, making it sound both sage and obscure. They continued maneuvering around piles of blackened slush. “Think about it: all of his known victims since mid-November have been men, with the exception of Wilma Jerrickson.”

“Maybe she was a mother image for him.” Tremble conceded.

“Possibly, though I think it was more a Virgin Mary angle.”

“Oh, come on,” Tremble snorted. “That lady was seventy years old. If you think she was a spinster, well, like the country song goes, I’ve got some ocean front property in Arizona.”

“You’ve seen the articles from LIFE on the Catholic school fire he was in as a child.” The American Dream looked up at the sky as if he could see the image of St. Vitus burning in the purple splotches between the clouds. “What I’m saying is that this is more a religious experience for him.”

“And you know what that cop Rizzi would say,” Tremble replied. “He’d say, go ahead, talk some shit.”

The wind shifted as they passed Crilly Court, and they heard punk music from the Exit, behind them on Wells. Everything around them, Tremble thought, even the rat gnawing at a Styrofoam box from McDonalds, its eyes wide with futile hope, was moving away from the last second desperately. Everyone hoped for constant change. He often thought of the bankers and the secretaries in the Loop as individual neutrinos careening through the Fermilab accelerator in Batavia.

Yes, everything was moving forward at breakneck speed. Everything but finding the man who killed Mike Surfer. Finding the Painkiller. He looked again at the ruins of Christmas gaiety, knowing that he had hardly noticed the holiday season at all.

Chicago’s Finest were doing their best, but when The American Dream, in his alter ego of Evan Shustak, had approached Jake Daves at the Harrison Street station house with Haid’s name, he found himself gently rebuffed. In this city, there was no Commissioner Gordon to Shustak’s righteous parody of The American Dream.

Chicago had never been home to a Bernard Goetz, a subway vigilante. The only serial killers here were those whose victims were gay or crippled. Men in wheelchairs being killed. The city of broad shoulders, Carl Sandburg had written in the forties. Tremble added: collapsed upon an atrophied spine.

“So, why would he come here, wherever the hell it is we’re headed, anyways?”

“We’re just about there, a house on Mohawk Street. A prostitute.”

“You’re kidding me, right?” Tremble stopped walking. “And you know exactly which one he’s going to?”

The American Dream turned back to Tremble, his mouth a thin slit behind the mask. “There is someone for everyone when it is needed,” he said.

“She’s known as Lullaby and Goodnight, and she’s handicapped. If you could call it that.” The light began to dawn on Tremble. They were out of the alley. A dull, beet-colored light across Mohawk washed over the Dream’s face like a blood clot bathing the brain.

“She’s also the highest paid hooker this side of Zombie Tongue in Perdition.” He nodded for Tremble to follow him in the direction of the light.

“You’re saying that she’s the highest paid call girl, and that—”

“That’s right, Vic.”

They neared a stairwell at the end of a trellised walkway. Tremble would find that the wooden steps led up to yet another elevated hell in his life. But, at this moment, his thoughts and understandings on what motivated a person to act in certain ways were for the most part naive.

“All the serial killers I’ve ever read about had about as much money as I do in my pocket now,” Tremble said after thinking about it a moment. He strained his eyes in the dim red light to see if anyone had carved their initials into the wooden railing. Or even their beliefs.

“There are exceptions,” the Dream said on the third stair. “Gacy made money from his construction business. And Christopher Wilder paid cash on his cross-country murder spree.”

Tremble did remember the balding man who chewed his nails to the quick and met his end in a gas station in New Hampshire.

“Exceptions,” he agreed.

And Gacy’s construction knowledge taught him how to dig with a shovel and pour cement, Tremble thought as they climbed upwards. What was John Wayne Gacy’s favorite country and western song? “I’m Walking The Floor Over You.” Tremble, you cutup, you.

They reached the second floor landing. The harsh glow from behind slatted blinds was brighter than a softer light from a third story window. A blue light wavered, and Tremble realized it was probably a television.

With the muted sounds of evening around them, the Dream said to the darkness, “Well, here we are.” The way he announced it, Tremble thought of a car pulled over into a Lover’s Lane and the lights of the city were laid out beneath them. While he pondered what it would be like to own a body that would allow him to drive a car, as well as permit him to touch a woman sensually in said car, spasm-free, he saw the American Dream staring at the darkness that loomed above them.

Not at the January sky, bruised purple and black, the light from the nearest stars barely making it through the pollution. The darkness, the American Dream knew, was a call girl who went by the name of Lullaby and Goodnight, with reasoning behind the usage of dual names being the darkest sky of all.

A woman with a young girl’s mind, who never spoke but mewled at all the right times, and who charged, rather Mama Tomei charged, upwards of five thousand dollars for the ultimate one night stand. The highest salaried men came to this dilapidated two-flat on North Mohawk, the turks of Chicago come to kill or mutilate the prostitute as she orgasmed, then return the following week to repeat the act. Mama Tomei took Visa, Mastercard, and Amex for the act itself. Most of the money might be needed for plastic surgery or bone reconstruction.

The ultimate one-night stand. The American Dream thought long and hard on that. Realizing that suicide came in a weak second to what was experienced here.

The velcro on his wrist braces whispered against the wooden railings, reminding Tremble of panty hose being slipped off of a woman he never loved, and then the masked man knocked on the door, twice, paused a heartbeat, and knocked twice again. Tremble wondered if it was a secret password or if the Dream’s arm had simply weakened while rapping.

The porch was enclosed on two sides; Tremble saw a swing near the north end of the landing, a strip of curled flypaper matted to the wire mesh behind it. Magazines were strewn around the well-swept flooring. He wondered if they were skin magazines, or, from what little he’d been told of the expected clientele, recent copies of U.S. News & World Report.

He looked over at Evan Shustak. The American Dream, who, as a way of life, catalogued things neatly in the separate prison cells of his brain, seemed not to care about the outer details of this place. These past weeks, since Mike Surfer’s disappearance and presumed death at the hands of the Painkiller, the only thing on his mind was the murderer’s capture. As they waited for a response to the knock, Tremble imagined a scenario involving an eye slit being pulled back from the door like at the El Rukn Headquarters on Drexel Blvd.

The door opened quietly. A woman so frail she made the Dream look like a television wrestler was framed in the kitchen light. One of those overhead jobs with two concentric rings of white light. She was five feet two, at best. Tremble had expected, hell...he just didn’t know anymore. Her eyebrows were penciled in and angled upwards the way a lunatic playing “She loves me, she loves me not,” with a dead rodent might arch his brows.

“You must be Evan,” the woman beamed, her accent vaguely Polish. Lugan, maybe.

Tremble still couldn’t get over it. The guy thought he was a superhero, yet everyone and their Auntie Charlotte knew his so-called secret identity. Or maybe they just think they know, himself included, and that was the American Dream’s biggest joke of all.

“And you must be Vic Tremble,” she took his hand. Their calluses touched. ”I am Mama Tomei. Call me Mama.”

“The pleasure is mine.” He smelled meat on her breath.

Mama Tomei swung her arms in a bid for them to enter Dracula’s Castle, and they walked across cracked linoleum the shade of pea soup that had been puked up into the gutter. A black and white Emerson, its antennae angled towards two o’clock, sat on a beige counter. Barney Miller was telling Wojo and Dietrich to handle a burglary over on Bleecker.

“Please,” the woman said, sliding into a chair. “You sit now.”

‘“You look as young as ever, living in this city that ages every living thing,” the Dream said as he sat down opposite the television.

“Evan, you are the kind one.” The woman fluffed napkins in a wooden holder cut into the shape of a blue duck. Her nails had been painted coral, but the color was chipping away on each finger. Tremble sat opposite her, the tablecloth between them a fractal image of pastel shapes.

“New cologne?” the Dream asked.

“No,” Mama Tomei said softly. “My daughter... she had a visitor. We hadn’t planned...” she let it trail.

“Oh,” the Dream simply said. “We didn’t see any cars out front.”

You ever hear of cabs, Tremble felt like saying then, for absolutely no good reason.

“Would either of you like some coffee? Mountain Grown, the best kind.” Pushing her chair away from the subject of visitors, she busied herself at the counter.

Enough of that, Tremble thought, finding new profiles of beige men smoking corn cob pipes in the tablecloth.

“I thought times like these were made for Taster’s Choice,” he muttered, low enough that the American Dream did not hear him.

* * *

All three were on their second cup, with Tremble just finishing up some small talk on a few of the residents at the Rainey Marclinn House. Both he and the American Dream felt that the Painkiller was zeroing in on the residents. When the dismembered corpses were first found back in November, the wheelchair-bound victims were scattered around the South Loop.

It was then that the American Dream, his mask pulled up over his nose so that he could sip his coffee, brought up the subject of why they had come.

“I, that is, we think we know who the Painkiller is, as I mentioned when we spoke on the phone yesterday.”

“Oh, my, yes.” Mama Tomei put her hand to her mouth. Tremble’s own mother Diedre would make the same motion when watching the nightly news, but only to pick at worry beads of scabs while she mouthed silent prayers for Hollywood celebrities or the First Lady’s upcoming thyroid operation.

“He’s the one been burning them people and cutting them up, such a terrible world we live in.” Tremble would bet dollars to doughnuts that she believed that the weather changes were due to the Apollo moon landing a generation before.

“I suspect there is more to it than simply cutting and torching the victims,” the Dream slapped his palm onto the table. “I just can’t figure the angle, is all.” His fingers spidered over his mask. Tremble’s forehead throbbed three pulses. He faintly heard the closing horns of the Barney Miller show. The WGN announcer then related how Davenport recalls the first time she met Furillo, in the next devastating episode of Hill Street Blues. Mike Surfer had loved cop shows most of all and with this thought Tremble felt a case of projectile vomit coming on as unbidden as pre-ejaculation.

He cleared his throat.

“Excuse me, Mrs., uh, Mama. I, well, I have to use your bathroom.” He was told that it was the first door on the left, down a darkened hallway. There was a mirror above the kitchen sink, and, passing it, Tremble saw that the grey hairs on his blond head looked like cobwebs.

* * *

Tremble could see that the walls down the length of the hallway were bare, but did not focus on any direction at all for fear of whatever hellish scenes the darkness held. He felt blindly for the recess where the bathroom door would be. The floor was carpeted; shadows of branches thrown against the living room bay windows danced to the odd theories of the American Dream, his voice droning on in the kitchen. The guy was grasping at straws, they both were. Maybe they should just let the cops solve it, Rizzi had told them that they were keeping it active whether or not dismembered bodies were found in the wheelchairs or not. The cop didn’t have to add that there was a mayoral special election coming on, in two months.

And he never was told why it seemed logical for the Painkiller to come here. There were plenty of cheaper places to go, both in the city and out in Cal City or Fallon Ridge. Tremble himself had taken in the go-go palaces of Calumet City several times.

Finally finding the bathroom, he was still nervous enough that his urine stream split into two separate dribbles. The seat was broken, yellowed tape was wrapped around the pieces. When he was finished, carefully wiping the seat with a tissue he then stuffed in his pants pocket, Tremble opened the door and faced the opposite wall.

Muted amber light shone at the stairwell landing. He heard a soft moan from upstairs. A female moan.

It took him but a second to decide. Turning the bathroom light back on, he gently closed the door that Mama Tomei might think he was simply having a slow bowel movement.

Three steps up, he recalled flushing the toilet. He hoped they hadn’t heard.

Tremble counted twelve steps—it was another of his compulsive-obsessive tendencies, and wasn’t it funny that the American Dream wanted to form a “super-hero” group with that same name?—and turned right at the top of the landing. He found himself face-to-face with a half-dozen of those infamous velvet dog paintings where they all stared at you with, their mournful eyes, lost dogs who stared at you with a gaze that cynical Tremble saw in the woman praying the stations of the cross at St. Sixtus while secretly asking only to win the Lotto.

He followed the amber light to encounter madness.

Stepping into the shadow in the L-shaped hallway. But he was still able to see the slice of the room visible to Tremble put the woman on the bed in profile from the knees up. She was nude. Lullaby…and Goodnight. The room itself was immaculate and the woman on the bed, Mama Tomei’s daughter, had a head growing out of her emaciated rib cage.

Her body was so pale that he wondered if she had ever seen daylight. Her face was not pretty. High cheekbones and thick hair in a widow’s peak, a crooked nose and a mouth that resembled a paper clip twisted by someone with caffeine nerves.

A sound from deep within her grimaced mouth told him that someone else was indeed in the room. The grunt was nowhere near what he had heard from the bathroom’s doorway.

Chicago’s elite paid five thousand?

The head.

Because of the head.

The head, also female, had sparse black hair and rested against Mama Tomei’s daughters’ breasts as though they were pillows. Tremble had a book at home about freaks. There was a photo of a black girl with part of a torso and legs growing out of her abdomen. She had lived to be twenty-six. When the head fell over to rest against her left elbow, Tremble had to fist his mouth to keep from gagging.

His presence was still unnoticed, though. The eyes, a dull grey, were rolled back into the head, with mostly the whites showing. Even the white was more like a dirty grey. As the head nestled in the crook of the girl’s arm, a faint orange drool dripped from the gaping mouth. It was then that Tremble again heard the sensuous female moan.

From the portion of the room he could not see, a sleek, tanned form walked over to the foot of the bed. She was totally naked. Of course she was, what the hell was he thinking?

Mesmerized by her downy thatch and firm breasts, it took him a moment to realize that he recognized the body. From imagining it, imagining her, naked on the evening news. It was the newswoman who was hell-bent on pleading with the Painkiller to stop killing innocent cripples.

Tremble watched the newswoman, who brought tears to the eyes of some and rating points to her network, finish the task of masturbating. Her thumb and three of her fingers were glistening. She wore the same nail polish as on the television, and her hand moved with the practiced movement of one accustomed to shuffling pages in the public eye.

When she knelt down between the prone girl’s legs, her eyes hungry, Tremble shut his eyes. He put his hand to his forehead, felt the pulse of the curled vein above his temple on his little finger.

It was the scream that made him open his eyes again.

The newscaster’s face had been buried between the girl’s thighs. She grunted a scream in orgasm. The mutated head showed no sign of life, if it ever had.

Not even when the newswoman grabbed its neck with both hands and throttled it like it was one of those cushioned “stress dolls.”

Her beautiful, blond, weeknights at five-six-and-ten hair whipping around her, the newswoman’s head bobbed furiously in the deformed girl’s crotch, as if her spine was broken and she could not get up. Her voice was muffled. She might have been cursing an ex-spouse, she could have, been mouthing the television station president’s name in syllables muffled by sweating flesh. Whatever she was saying, her voice rose as she pressed her perfectly-sculpted fingernails under the mutated head’s jawbones. The face quickly purpled. Its drooling had stopped...

Mama Tomei’s daughter shook her own head from side to side, her eyes squeezed shut in passion or pain.

The newswoman’s fingers spidered over the lower head as if it held a message in Braille. She pulled down the side of the mouth closest to Tremble, breaking the skin, scratching a red line back to the ear. There was very little blood. What came out was more like a snotty nosebleed.

With her other hand, she pulled at the thing’s tongue and let it snap back into the mouth. Her fingers then moved across the entire face. Tremble thought again of a blind person, this time reading for emotions.

The daughter moaned louder, less guttural. The newswoman lifted her head, positioned her thumbs, and her moans became one with the girl’s as she plunged them into the head’s eyes. The tissue ran, down the pale cheeks like runny eggs. Fluid leaked down the head’s cheek and into its ear.

When the woman humped against the edge of the bed twice and then looked up and breathed a thank you to not the girl, but the mutilated head, Tremble knew that he could take no more.

* * *

Frank Haid, their suspected Painkiller, had never come for the favors of Lullaby and Goodnight. Vic Tremble understood fully why the American Dream had thought he might have come. As an act of contrition.

On the way back to the relative sanity of Armitage Avenue after midnight, the American Dream spoke quietly. “The head was stillborn. That’s why she can charge so much, and why she has to.”

Tremble stared at the storefront businesses, Natalie’s Hair Salon, a garish “Leinenkugel now on tap!” sign in front of Club Ennui, a flyer in the window bearing the legend Home of the Elviscera, a row of two-flats with either plastic palm trees, crucifixes, or promo photos of Richard

M. Daley, Jr., in the front windows. Down Wells Street there were more street hustlers and corner cafes. He recalled the newswoman’s face. How many times...?

“They can do whatever they want to the head,” he heard the American Dream say as they made it to State. “Strangle it, whatever.”

“They use the johns’ money for plastic surgery and bone reconstruction. The eyes are fake. Fiberglass. Guy named Timpone sends them from New York. Mama Tomei says that, lately, more and more of the johns are going for the eyes.”

The two men waited in silence for the downtown bus.

Chapter Forty-Three

As Haid ascended the stairwell on the southeast side of Grand, between State and Dearborn, the wind gusts were averaging thirty miles per hour, coming off the lake. Near one of the bridges which stitched the Loop with the rest of the city, a film company was shooting a movie about a killer doll, evidently named Chucky, by the way the crowd was chanting. Haid was able to see the spotlights and heat lamps, though the entourage was blocks away.

He paid no mind to the fictional drama unfolding to the west. And he was not cold. Father’s aura warmed him. As did the long underwear and high school sweater that he wore underneath his suede jacket. The sweater had been Vince Janssen’s, the school had been Peabody, and the legend the younger man had scripted on the back in younger days read HUBBA HUBBA.

He heard a dog barking, and he wondered if it was a dog that would save everyone from the killer doll. He hadn’t heard mention of an animal in the film when they talked about it on the television. The dog sounds gave him a rush of déjà vu, something slipped out of the old cranial vault.

Thou shalt have no dog befoul me. A recurring dream-sound. It wasn’t Father’s voice. It wasn’t his own voice, either. He had started hearing that long ago voice a few months ago, when he could still talk to Father face to face.

After the incident, Haid had tossed the remaining white desipramine capsules off the Flechette Street overpass, letting Dr. Bruinooge’s precious little anti-depressants tumble down to Goose Island like teeth knocked from a young child’s mouth for doing something BAD BAD BAD. And the long ago voice came ba—

And just like that, he understood. He clapped his hands together like a patient man.

The fireman from 1958 had whispered to him in intimacy: THOU SHALT HAVE NO GODS BEFORE ME.

The knowledge was exquisite.

He stopped for a hot dog and can of Just Whistle cola—to which Father a-okayed his pouring a generous amount of Seagram’s V.0., for added warmth, of course—at the Mr. Grand’s Park-N-Eat. Continuing south, he chewed and gulped, watching a sliver of elevated train pass between the buildings on Franklin Street. He passed two Mexicans arguing about a labor dispute.

He crossed the river at Dearborn; Verbeerst had lived behind him, the woman just down the block. Now they both lived in the glorious everlasting heaven. Let us celebrate the mysteries of life...

A Star-Spangled cabbie blew the yellow light and gave Haid the finger because he almost got himself run down.

He passed the Merchandise Mart, and was in the shadows of a Skid Row that was being regentrifiedwith yuppie loft apartments. The Michael Todd theater at the corner of Lake and Dearborn, which had shown such wondrous movies as Fantasex Island and On Golden Blond at five bucks a crack, pun intended, was now the cutesy-named Dearborn Station, where those upwardly mobile couples who didn’t want to deal with Facets Multimedia or the Fine Arts could brave the fringes of the Loop battleground and plop down their twelve bucks a head, no pun possible, and nod those heads thoughtfully to the world according to Woody Allen and go to their stupid jobs the following Monday in their power ties and buttons and bows and talk like they actually knew one fucking thing about the reality of day to day, hand to shit to mouth, life in Chicago.

You could erase the ghetto or the slum from the equation, change the denominator from a black man in a Rowls Invacare wheelchair who had forgotten his social security number when Nixon was still president with a shitgrin-shined face who wears his color-coordinated scarf outside of his overcoat and drinks diet wine coolers like someone in a J.

D. Salinger novel gone wrong, but the answers to the problems wouldn’t really change at all.

Sometimes, he didn’t know what the hell he was trying to think about. But he did know this: he cherished life as well as afterlife. He had been shown the afterlife for several minutes thirty-one years ago. In the holy fire where he had been reborn as the only son. And Jesus had wept for Francis Haid not to go back.

But the crucified man had allowed young Haid to finish his life by bringing others before him. From the world where men died senselessly every day. He’d give their passing meaning.

It wouldn’t happen today, he was just walking the route. No one in a chair out tonight. Father would be lonely were it not for Haid talking to him.

He continued on towards Daley Plaza, where there were more theaters showing the current conquests of Rambo and Jason Vorhees. Fuck and die, the choice of a new generation. Too bad Pepsi-Cola had dibs on that slogan.

Haid had his own slogan.

This is my body.

* * *

The wheelchairs were beautiful. But that would change. Murdy had to have pulled a few strings to get the chairs. Neither Shustak or Tremulis would ever know that the small man had paid eight hundred dollars cash for them.

Everest & Jennings, Shustak’s jet-black, Tremulis’s Doevin Blue. That’s what it said in the owner’s manual. Powder blue like on an air freshener can.

Tremulis felt guilty: Mike Surfer had never had anything this good. Padded naugahyde 24" molded rear wheels with plastic metal spokes, 8" molded caster wheels “for a sporty look” and detachable footrest and butterfly strap. “Move away from the clinical look of the past,” it said in the brochure.

He plopped himself into the chair and ran his hands over the tires. Damn comfortable chair. Give him one of those vibrating pillows for his back and he’d be set.

“They look too new,” Shustak said.

That was obvious, Tremulis thought, but did not say.

“We’ll take them through the alley, let them sit in the weather for a day or so. Scrape them up a bit and cover them with blankets. We’ll fool that bastard Haid.”

Tremulis hoped so. He wondered what kind of scars they would be left with.

* * *

PALESTINE: MURDERS OF COMMIES AND FAGS!

let the uprising of stones pave the way for PEOPLE’S WAR!!!

KHOMEINI POPE FALL WELL NORTH

SI DIOS ES TAN GRANDE CUCARACHAS

Y CHI-CHIS

WHAT? WHAT?

Tremulis looked at the small courtyard, at the squalor just beyond the confines of the Marclinn. It seemed to have been swept regularly, most likely by Nutman or maybe even Reve. But the graffiti was incredible. Much of it faded by months and years had the artists’ and writers’ ideals changed since then? He read on, looking closer at torn white flyers.

WHEN YOU SMOKE YOUR BABY DOES AS WELL. WHEN YOU DO DRUGS

WHEN YOU ARE PREGNANT, YOUR BABY CAN GET AIDS, TOO.

COYOTE GOSPEL RING MY THING PAP MY PLIP

IN MY SHIVERING CHAIR

GANGSTER CITY

L’IL SKULLY LIMBO ME, MINE LIMBO

ALLLUSTREISBLAK AUNQUE

EL REMEDO PARA

SIDA ESTA

MUYAJENO

PREVENCION

ESTA ALREDOR

DE LA ESQUINA.

RIDE THE CTA FREE ON NEW YEAR’S EVE 8PM-6AM courtesy of BUDWEISER.

“They’ll be safe here,” Shustak said. The courtyard was bounded by Callan’s Flowers, the Treasure Chest arcade, and an abandoned building in disrepair.

“Are you ready for this, Vic?” Shustak looked at him.

“Yes,” he replied. The image of the deformed hooker was still in his mind, fresh as a scattershot wound. He had long ago stopped wondering about the Givers of Pain and Rapture’s mysteries. He simply accepted their idiosyncrasies.

“This is my world,” Shustak said. “Where I am is what I am.”

Tremulis had never believed otherwise.

* * *

Reve Towne sat on her Murphy bed, grimacing over what she had to endure earlier that day. She had gone to the Chicago Avenue station to get a list of witnesses and potentials, they were called, from Dean Conover. The guy had practically undressed her with his eyes.

She planned on talking with some of the people while Evan and Vic were doing the wheelchair stakeouts. Christ, how she hoped they weren’t doing the wrong thing, or going about it the wrong way.

But she knew they were too far into it now.

She massaged her toes as she rocked back and forth, scanning the pages. Conover had kept running his hand over his gun holster, like it was supposed to turn her on. That was right up there with the boys of summer cruising down the street and turning up their car radios at the stoplights, right, like hearing REO Speedwagon bleating “157 Riverside Avenue” was supposed to give women the screaming thigh sweats.

And she about gagged when Conover told her how he didn’t need to wear a Kevlar vest because his skin was tough enough to stop bullets.

Reve could not understand why the killings had gone on so long and there was so little to piece together. It was like Ed Gein killing everybody up in Plainfield, Wisconsin; a town whose population could live on the first seven floors of any building downtown. No one knew that Gein was robbing graves and making belts out of nipples because no one in town cared what the hell happened to anyone. It was the same thing here, only updated to the late eighties.

She wondered if the Painkiller would continue on with his grisly work until he finally slipped up, or if he would die in a car accident or be arrested for something else. Her father had been a cop and had been involved with the search for the DeSouza boy in 1972. A guy arrested for D&D in Minnesota during the Bicentennial, out of the blue, told the Faribault County sheriff about all these trees that had little boys stuffed in them, DeSouza being one of thirteen skeletons eventually found.

Would Evan or Vic encounter the Painkiller? Could that really happen? Would they have the element of surprise, the use of their legs being the hole card in a fast game of murder?

Could they run fast enough to avoid whatever the Painkiller chose to use on them?

She didn’t know. She couldn’t know.

Chapter Forty-Four

Haid crossed Clark Street against the light. This time of night on a Wednesday, the streets were deserted anyways.

The silence and the beauty of the winter evening belonged to the junkies and the con men now, the orgasm of the moment torn from him with the harsh intimacy of a gold necklace ripped from the neck of the Berwyn secretary who picked the wrong damn night to work late. Unlike the night, the chain would be offered with a whisper of jive in the alley that separated the Burger King from the Marclinn House.

The night would only be offered again to those who resisted, the gangbangers maybe tossing in the moon on a knife, a star in every slice.

Soon, it would be over for him, as well. Martyrs did not fear death. Leave this stupid city to those who took drugs but never had a day of pain in their lives. The con men and shuckers, who would have strong legs, yet work the elevated trains instead of someplace honest.

No, Haid would follow in Father’s footsteps. “Let them crucify me on the Miro sculpture,” he whispered conspiratorially. He stared up at the thing situated in the Brunswick building alcove on Washington, its extensions making it resemble a Lost In Space monster reject more than a cross, but the idea still stayed in his head. And in Father’s head, as well, the severed part that lived in Haid and guided him toward gloryland.

Haid turned back toward the plaza, toward the Picasso sculpture. If one wanted to think such a thing, the two sculptures—Miro’s “Woman” and Picasso’s “Head of A Woman”—faced each other off, one looking like a pimp-slapped whore, the other a mutated lioness. “And you could be my whore, Mary,” Haid addressed Miro with a tip of an imaginary hat.

Father found his antics amusing. As in life, Haid continued to do things to impress Father.

July, 1965.

Francis Madsen, there is nothing wrong with two men pissing into the same bowl at the same time. There’s no need to flinch, boy.

It’s just flesh.

Flesh of my flesh.

Touch it if you want, Francis. Go on now.

This is my body, given up for you.

You know, son. You are really beginning to develop.

Con men, junkies, jackrollers, and whores. That was why he couldn’t save all of his first few souls. Father had taken only the parts that hadn’t sinned.

A No.20 Madison westbound droned by, empty as erotic foreplay. It was an isolated sound. The air was frigid. With Father’s hair tonic shining in each stroke of his hair, well, it made him shiver so.

He read a sign on the outside of the bus lengthwise. Solo digita a la operada. AT&T Espanol.

“Damn P.R.s,” Father, with all his prejudices, mumbled inside him like a second heartbeat.

* * *

He watched the metal wink at him, unsure. Looka me Unca Vince, an echo of a younger voice in the newly christened burn ward at Lutheran Deaconess. Haddon and Leavitt Streets, Stanislaus Miklas was the man in charge. Never could explain the black smudge in Haid’s brain on the x-rays.

Haid recalled Vince Janssen’s weeping, but was it for his sister’s last hope of an unscarred child or for his own wicked tendencies? He had found the scars, unbearable for so long.

Stepping closer, tentatively. Haid never once thought that the liquid-looking glint could have been a gun barrel fluidly pointed his way by some, combat-happy spic like Father had always warned him about after the Humboldt Park neighborhood changed hands. It wasn’t the niggers’ fault until after Martin Luther King was killed.

Stepping closer. He was arcing around the back of the Picasso sculpture with the wind in his face. Father in his heart. An aching in his soul. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy

(terror)

ghost. Amen.

Haid faced the hollow wedge at the back of the Picasso’s base; the pillars of the Daley Center and the dying neon of Randolph Street were to his back. He waited until a black man in an army jacket hawking those same gold chains, passed by. Tell them where you got it, and how easy it was. Or, tell them where you lost it and never saw it coming.

Yesterday’s news was ashes blowing around Haid’s ankle as he approached the metal sculpture. Late for someone to be out, late for a cripple to be out. There was no time clock in Heaven. It was like Las Vegas. Haid thought that one up on his own. Father just wanted the new soul.

Four garbage cans stood around the angled corners of the Picasso like sentries. The front of the burnished brown thing inclined upwards at, he guessed, a thirty degree angle. The glint Father was curious about came from within the crevice.

It wasn’t strange that Haid would find a man living in this crevice, a handicapped man whose wheelchair had been the source of the wink. What was strange was the story the man told him.

Haid bent down, his eyes adjusting to the blackness within. When the man shot a pencil flashlight at him, one of those Kool cigarette promotional jobbers, the fearless Painkiller about jumped out of his skin. Because of the man’s cramped position, Haid saw his face, stubble on his chin like shadowed porcupine needles, and black lines under his eyes like streaks of tar.

Father was curious, as was Haid.

“Hello?” A weak voice from the crumpled man. Looked like he had no skeletal structure. “I have a gun, you know, so don’t try anything.”

The threat sounded as sincere as Oliver North during the Iran-Contra hearings.

“I’m not a crook,” Haid almost laughed. From North to Nixon. “I’m just... wondering.”

“Well, stop wondering,” the weak voice answered. The tiny flashlight flickered. “My name’s Martin. Martin Last. Sit down and I’ll tell you about the aliens.”

Haid got down on his knees and crawled into the wedge. What the hell, right? It was warmer in the confined space. The man smelled like his bathing habits consisted of liberal splashes of Aqua Velva.

Martin Last had set the flashlight up against his torso; it made his nostrils seem like cave entrances. His eyebrows were shadowed flames. He was layered in old blankets. Stacked next to him were packages of Slim Jims and a silver canteen.

The folded wheelchair was between them, like it was a fortress for Last. Haid maneuvered around it.

“Tell me about what?” He wrinkled the skin around his eyes when he squinted with interest.

* * *

In a nutshell (or nutcase, as it was), Martin Last was a twenty-five year old paraplegic who blamed his paralytic disease on small grey beings from a planet forty light years from Earth, circling a star in the constellation of Reticulum.

“My mother was agoraphobic all her life,” he had said with complete seriousness. “A shrink at Michael Reese was able to get her to say that something had happened to her in the parking lot at Riverview during the summer of 1963.” Riverview had been a large amusement park on Chicago’s Northwest side, bounded by Western, Belmont, Roscoe, and the river. It had closed in 1968 and the land was now shared by a strip mall and the DeVry School of Technology.

“She was pregnant with me at the time and so it wasn’t rape or anything.” Haid figured that right; raping pregnant women wasn’t in vogue in this city until recently. Last paused again, as if uncertain about continuing. Then he barreled right into it.

“The aliens, the greys, they touched her and made me unclean in the eyes of their god. They know about me still and this is the only place I can escape from them.” He looked at Haid, his eyes pained. Haid wasn’t quite certain if what the boy was saying related to him and Father. What did he mean, their God? He could accept the idea of space people, there were stories like that in the newspapers Father had brought back from the supermarket. There was only one God, one true Father, and he was trusting and giving and he loved all of his creatures great and small.

“You.. .you’re saying you... live here?” In this city, there weren’t a million stories, but a few core natives took care of making the actual tales original. Even nearing the age of forty, Haid thought that he had seen it all. Seen everything once.

He always ended up being wrong about such things.

“Yes,” the man said, a tic shivering across his face. “They stuck a rod into my mother’s womb. I’m not sure if their intention was to have it cripple me, something went into the placenta.”

“You live here?” Haid asked again, thinking maybe the first time, he had only thought the question.

“Not always.” Last fell silent. Haid knew that the man was recalling the past. He wondered if he would reminisce aloud. “I was born breach. Breach baby, breach baby, there on the sand,” he sang, and laughed a nicotine laugh.

“My legs never healed correctly. My mother blamed the breach on her anxiety. This was long before Oprah and Geraldo had people like her on their shows. People with agoraphobia, I mean. Not CE4s. Abductees. Maybe I’m a CE5.”

Haid wondered just what the fuck this guy was talking about. Codes or something. He had seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but didn’t make the connection. He felt like saying something equally bizarre and notional, like, use the shivering phone and ask for handmaiden. She knows of fanciful ducks.

Or something like that.

“She, my mother, was shopping in Lynch-Giddings when she came across this book called Visitation Rites. She told me about it, how the faces and the eyes scared her so much.” He stopped, making a sound like he was sipping at the stale air. “She was obsessed by things in that book and last year she drank some mercuric chromide and died and now I live here.”

Haid opened his mouth, more to clear his throat, when Martin Last’s voice dropped to a hoarse whisper.

“I think that the greys are angry that I let her die before they were through with her.”

Haid thought about how fucked up his own childhood was.

“At least now I understand my childhood nosebleeds,” Last said. “The book tells how they have sex with women and when they found out my legs were weak they let her keep me.” He stared at Haid for ages and a single blink. “The greys will be responsible for reuniting Germany and causing a war in the Middle East. It will be renamed Saudi America and martial law will be declared here. They won’t be able to find me here.”

Haid did not know which “they” Last was referring to. Father had no answer, either.”I believe you,” Haid said.

“You do?” Last slumped back as he expelled a frosty breath.

“Do you believe in God?” Haid continued. “Our Father?”

“I see red tarantulas coming down the Daley Building, but they can’t see me here, like they could when I lived on Trumbull.”

Haid was moving closer even as he became aware of Father’s intentions, and the topmost part of the wedge flattened his hair.

“In the name of the Father,” Haid reassured himself.

“They vibrate a different way than we do.” Last was in his own world. “Part of Einstein’s Unified Field Theory.”

Haid reached forward to touch the other man’s shoulders. His palms warmed and he thought maybe it was a shade lighter inside the statue’s base.

“They can make their ships fly this way. The Stealth Bomber flies this way. That book says that the greys live out in a dried lake bed in Nevada.”

“I think your story is fascinating,” Haid said, pulling him forward. “Just like the scriptures.” Their chests touched and Haid’s eyes blurred for, a moment. Might have been caused by the penlight.

Haid had to burrow towards the very back of the wedge, pushing Martin Last along. He felt like a human snow plow more so because parts of the man were falling to either side of the path he made.

“I’m so warm, is my nose bleeding?”

That’s what he was saying as Haid’s hands met in the center of Martin Last’s spinal cord. The man’s essence poured up his veins and filled him with radiance. Still, he had to draw the body forward and kiss him before he was consumed in the rapture.

There in the Picasso, Haid slept, sated.

Chapter Forty-Five

Evan Shustak was hurting bad. PAIN PAIN PAIN in my Brain PAIN PAIN BRAIN BRAIN in my b

What it was: the man’s pain relievers were gone. His heating pad, the cord long ago frayed but still workable. Gone. The Hell’s Kitchen sweatshirt, the wrist braces. Gone. Ditto the little bags of pills and lozenges.

His costume was his pain reliever. He often thought about the amount of placebos that were force-fed to just about everybody these days, from Anne Klein dress-for-success outfits to the Air Jordan hightops that meant you weren’t just some project spook.

One thing about this, though. It actually helped him to be without relief. The pain helped detail his face into the semblanceof a potential Painkiller victim.

Shustak’s (he was not the American Dream, for the duration) right shoulder sloped forward and a twitch rictused the left corner of his mouth into a pathetic sneer. Toes curled up in one shoe because the laces were not as tight as in the other.

Same old bone tunes night and day

My neve endings strings that the Lesser Gods play—

One hand deliberately wrung the beige blanket on his lap.

Dr. Wagner would say that the heating pad cape, et al., were what kept his patient from going insane. Not the direct relief, but rather a symbolic succor in the form of, to him, a metahuman’s uniform.

The city paid for Shustak’s psychiatric bills, in the form of disability checks he received from Springfield. The state paid for loafers and alkies to do much less than patrol the city streets with no hope of release.

Reve had left him near the Cryin’ Dime, in the shadows of City Hall. The Marclinn was in sight to the east. He allowed a flashing red and blue neon guitar with the Old Style legend imprint his face.

As if any of the regulars would notice him in their misty alcohol fog, Shustak still disguised himself; in his words, he didn’t need Zero Stanley or Slappy Vander Putten blowing the entire operation.

He hadn’t shaved for several days. Made it look like he had a bad cut—Skinny Minny Krejca had showed him how, using strips of cold hot dog—over his eye and parted his hair different.

Nick Desmond, Murdy’s bartender, had drawn a rough sketch of the guy he had glimpsed back of the Cass Hotel. Reve was now showing the sketch around to the key players in the Painkiller saga. She had left him sitting there at six that night, the 20th of January, and was to return at nine with sandwiches.

The door to a Perkins cab slammed shut and his entire body palsied up.

This was not a deliberate motion.

* * *

Tremulis was popping wheelies in the subway near the Clark/Lake Transfer stop. He would stay underground, with Shustak staying in the streets above. There had been no reported Painkillings since late December, and the detectives, Daves and Petitt, thought that the increasing cold might be scaring him into hibernation. Or to warmer climes, Petitt had gone so far as to send a departmental FYI to each city along the well-travelled Greyhound line from Chicago to New Orleans.

That was all nice and well, but it held little bearing for Tremulis, who was imagining the love and adoration he would receive from Reve after he, Vic Tremble, Average Guy, captured the Painkiller. He continued with his wheelie-popping, pretending the small wheels were landing on the Painkiller’s neck, and Tremulis’ full weight was causing the killer to die in spasms Of agony. He thought of the hooker, Lullaby and Goodnight, fully understanding how someone could have the killing lust as self-gratification.

He continued his clever little maneuvers, with more people watching him than a saxophonist playing “The Lover’s Concerto” near a newspaper kiosk. Much to the musician’s disdain, since Trernulis had shown up, he had made a total of thirty-seven cents and a bus token.

Chapter Forty-Six

Reve Towne clutched a sheaf of sketches in her hands because it was too cold to separate each page when she came across someone in a wheelchair. What she’d do, was hand three or four to each one. God knew there were more than enough to go around. Why were so many handicapped street people out here? Reve wasn’t thinking about the Painkillings, but of the temperature. She thought that sitting stationary all day would lower someone’s blood pressure.

Still, there would be plenty of flyers to go around. Though there were quite a few crippled men, they were staying visible and, for the most part, heading wherever they called home before the nine-to-flyers left their jobs. She and Evan had run off copies at the all night Kinko’s at Wells and Isola. She was glad for the cold and not the freezing rain so common to Chicago in January. After she passed out as many as possible to those in chairs, she would tape the flyers to lampposts on the mall.

It was a good thing that the cops, while not believing that Frank Haid could be a suspect without probable cause, were still persuasive in their ways. Several of the men— including Chubby Love, one of Mike Surfer’s friends, and Reve was startled to see him resigned to a wheelchair—had told her that Rizzi and Morisette had sternly told them to stay at the Servicemen’s Center at the Madison Building or up at the 7th Street Hotel.

And for the hundredth time, Reve wondered if they were doing the right thing singling out one man in a city of three million, even if it wasn’t by name.

It was all hunches. But the police worked on those same hunches. Yes, Frank Haid sounded crazy, and he was seen in the vicinity of one of the first murders, but did that give them the right to suspect him any more than another?  The police had a list of possible perps, including those incarcerated in recent weeks.  There had been a killing on 23rd and Pulaski, under the El tracks, that was most certainly copycat.  And Frank Haid was indeed on their list of suspects.

But still she thought about persecuting the innocent.  She remembered a chapter in the annals of Chicago's killing history: a schizophrenic black man who happened to be hanging out in Grant Park at the time of the ax murders in the summer of 1973 was tried and convicted of the crime.  The true killer had confessed some eight years later, the black man in jail the whole time.  Both had gotten a kind of religion.

No, Reve was concerned with what Evan or Vic would do if they did encounter the elusive Painkiller.

The canary-yellow sheets showed a rough sketch of Haid.  Nick Desmond had given them a good description, and had been adamant on illustrating the man's furrowed brow.

Underneath the sketch, which had originally been done in charcoal, Reve had printed the words:

HAVE YOU BEEN APPROACHED BY

THIS MAN??? HE MIGHT BE THE

PAINKILLER!

DON’T THINK THAT THIS WON’T

HAPPEN TO YOU!!

Reve knew that if the police actually caught her pinning these up, her ass was grass. And if it was Dean Conover that saw her, well, her ass was one of the things she was worried about.

Underneath the admonishment, she had written the names of as many SROs as she could think of:

HOTEL LASALLE 215 W. WASHINGTON

HOTEL MORTON  538 S. DEARBORN

METROPOLIS  211 W. CO UCH

MARCLINN  29 W. RANDOLPH

7TH STREET HOTEL  2 E. BALBO

PACIFIC GARDEN  646 S. STATE

HOTEL DAHLIA  39 W. NORTON

ST. FRANCIS CENTER  122 W. KINZIE

BENEDICT FLATS  100 W. ONTARIO

Once, she had to duck into the Bordeaux Restaurant to avoid being seen with the flyers by Rizzi and Morisette, even though she was certain the two beat cops would know immediately who was distributing the sketches of the Painkiller. She wondered if it might not be a bad idea to send a copy to one of the television stations. Channel Seven, the ABC affiliate, was right there at State and Lake.

Man of La Mancha was playing at the Chicago The-ater, and a Winner’s Circle off-track betting parlor had opened up alongside the bagel shop in the sixty-odd days since Wilma Jerrickson’s death in the alleyway. Near the Orleans Street bridge, she gave several flyers to a Rastafarian whose ringlets were frosted by the river cold, and he returned her concern, by telling her that God Blessed Her. Further north, a short man with a walker said he “onnie wanna shot anna.” For a brief moment, Reve thought that the man was confessing to a murder.

She never saw either man again, and later often wondered if the Bible and the barstool-thumpers ended up as two of the Painkiller’s victims.

For there are always unknown victims.

And Reve didn’t know what was worse: the amount of street people out here in the dead of winter, or the amount of the working class who simply ignored them as they would a mope passing out flyers for the new Mr. Submarine.

On Kingsbury and Isola, an old lady wearing two different colored surgical masks huddled around an upright cart. The cart was piled with pale garbage bags wrapped in string. The tightness of the string made the whole thing seem to be a living bulbous mass. The same could be said of the woman in her layers of cloth.

Near One Illinois Center’s south tower, Reve saw a black man who seemed to be blind, but sure as hell knew what was going on around him. He had a beatnik goatee and shook a red plastic cup from Irving’s Red Hots. The noisily-jangled cup, on closer examination, was half-filled with mostly copper. Maybe everybody else had caught on that the guy was following the girls wearing leg warmers over their blue jeans with his “sightless” eyes.

She passed him and heard the dull chink of some gullible soul dropping him a quarter. Near the Kroch’s and Brentano’s on Michigan, another man sat with his legs folded up underneath him like a flattened accordion. He was wearing grey mechanic coveralls over a midnight-blue parka with orange hood lining. It was as if the coveralls were the man’s testament to actually having an honest job at one time.

As she walked up to hand him a flyer, she saw words on the front double pocket of the coveralls: BILL’S BODY SHOP, 24 Hr Towing, 806 Otter Creek Road, Streator 64, Illinois. She wondered when the last time was that she had seen a zip code written that way. Probably in one of Evan’s Blue Beetle or Holy Terror comics in an advertisement for Mason Shoes or a tie that lit up “Will you kiss me in the dark, baby.”

And there was a woman whose face looked like it had imploded, muttering about Christ and paint chippings, and another with a baby in her needlepointed arms, a voice like an airhorn. Words blowing out through crooked gaps between her teeth: gimme mbaby somto EEEEEEAAAAAATTTT—A guy on State Street near the Stevens Building, wearing only one shoe over red socks, talking to a foot messenger that looked like a little skull girl. The guy was wearing a three-piece sharkskin suit and dragging a Burberry overcoat underneath the shoeless foot, begging the messenger and anyone else who would listen that all he needed was ten dollars to use a FAX machine in the lobby of the Pathway Financial.

All of them real people, leading real lives.

* * *

Dean Conover, off-duty and sipping bonded bourbon, watched Reve crisscrossing the street from a front table at Nolan Void’s. He was just finishing up a joke to Mather, who had just signalled for another beer. He was wearing a chambray shirt. His partner wore a navy blue tee that read TO SERVE AND PROTECT… whenever we FUCKING feel like it!

“Hey, I got another,” Conover said, absently touching his crotch whenever Reve moved on. She was talking with a couple of crips that had staked out the area near where they were starting construction on a Stouffer’s Hotel. Plenty of people in the afternoon waiting for the buses that turned off Wacker, he supposed.

“Like I have a choice,” Mather didn’t even make it a question.

“So there are these two lawyers on a plane, coming into O’Hare from some shine city like Detroit,” Conover said, getting into it. “One’s a Jew, the other ain’t. The plane hits some turbulence over the lake or something, and everybody thinks they’re gonna crash. Oh, yeah. Almost forgot, the Jew is wearing glasses. They land okay, and the guy Catholic looks at the Jew and sees him doing like the sign of the cross...”

“Hey, look.” Mather didn’t want to hear any more, and he tapped the window. “It’s Reve Towne. Wonder what she’s passing out?”

“Man, she’d be a knockout if she was passing gas!” Conover said, too loud. “Can I go for a piece of her,” he said with a modicum of leering enthusiasm.

And he forgot to finish his joke, so that was something.

Chapter Forty-Seven

The three of them sat in Nolan Void on the night of the deathwatch. Tremulis looked around at the crowd. Mostly groups of threes. What was it about that number? One of the bouncers at Hard Rock Cafe carried a card in his wallet. It said CHOOSE ONE: 1,2,3,4 on the front. The flip side read IF YOU PICKED 3 THEN YOU ARE A SEX FIEND. Truth was, most people picked three.

Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

See no evil, Hear no evil, Speak no evil.

The deathwatch: it was Monday, the 23rd of January, and serial killer Ted Bundy was madly scrabbling with the police, confessing to murders of women in Colorado and Idaho, hoping for a stay of the execution that had finally caught up with him.

Sitting there amidst the beer chuggers and the dead longneck soldiers on the tables around them, it could have been that they were the only three pessimists there.

Tremulis and Shustak were still in the Everest & Jennings wheelchairs, trying to stay the part for the duration. They sat there in the bar with their eyes on the tube, rather than someplace else on the off chance that the Painkiller might show his face for a final salute to one of his kin. The way a killer might pop in for a final eyeball at his gash in a casket.

You could watch Bundy sweating from three different angles, with two television sets at either end of the bar, plus a big screen job above the jukebox and Joker Poker game. The sets would rattle each time a Lake Street elevated rumbled by like tangible thunder, and no one seemed in the least concerned that the televisions might fall on them.

Normally the bar would have a Hawks game on SportsVision. Tonight it was CNN and Bundy jokes, all around. Free Home fries if Bundy fries. Buckle up, Ted. It’s the law! Posters on the bar advertised the coming weekend’s band Skinhead Jesus Joe and the Fever Beings. Three dollar cover, two drink minimum.

The volume was turned down on the sets. It was enough to just watch Bundy sweat. Tremulis had read about him back in high school. His fingers drummed the chair’s armrest as the TV flashed prom photos of girls dead a decade.

Someone dropped silver into the Seeberg. The Widows of Whitechapel’s “Tricks We Tried Today.” Of all people, it was Shustak who sang along with the compact disc, soft as a man in church on the sly.

“Tricks we tried today, that we might wake up

With tomorrow in our eyes, and in our throats,

A veiled tongue, a thin disguise,

The gangman lied about the tricks

We tried today. Snub your thumb

At the stiff palace, small denial

And lesser malice, towards the tricks

We tried today...”

Tremulis half expected Shustak to open his mouth for the communion wafer. Behind them, a waitress was making change: “Five and ten, hon. Here you go, babe.”

“Tomorrow morning Bundy will be dead,” Shustak said, fingering the beige blanket that now smelled of cigarette smoke as well as the street.

“Yes he will and a damn good thing,” someone passing on his way to the john mumbled. “Yea yea yea,” a seated patron agreed, his words sounding as if they were stumbling out of his mouth of their own volition.

“One less.” It was all Tremulis wanted to say on it.

“One less.” Reve touched her Tom Collins glass of ginger ale.

“And how many people are out there tonight, sharpening their first knives on tonight’s telecasts?” Shustak said, looking first at Reve, than at Tremulis.

No one answered him, although someone at the bar commented on what a looker one of the sorority girls Bundy had killed was. His drinking companion had to remind him that the girl was dead, for one, and two, if she was alive she’d be pushing forty.

But that changed nothing.

* * *

They left Nolan Void just after midnight, Terrible Ted still alive. Reve called a Checker cab from the bar and gave them both hugs before she disappeared into the back seat. The cab’s interior smelled of lanolin.

They wheeled out back of the Marclinn and called it a night. Neither knew that they were being watched. The man following them was onto what was happening. No conspiracy there. There they were now, walking out of the alley and into the rooming house. What, did they think this was some made-for-TV movie?

He knew them for what they were. The rookie crips were those two that had hung around with Surfer. Smooth Tee had told him so, and when Tee heard what his plans were, the man said, “Take a ‘luude, dude.” Easy for him to say.

He didn’t care about the older one. The shadow on the street was more interested in the one Tee called The American Dream.

* * *

Ted Bundy was executed at 6:16 AM Chicago time on Tuesday, 24 January 1989. That same time, Victor Tremulis had a muscle spasm while shaving and tore a chunk of skin off of his jawbone.

Shustak looked at it with approval, saying that the Painkiller might go for the dried blood.

To stop thinking about Reve, Tremulis stayed in the Marclinn’s bathroom and let the blood drip from his face in thick red goblets. Sitting on the low sink, his pants around his ankles, he aimed the blood towards his flaccid morning penis.

Chapter Forty-Eight

Days continued to blend together like a medley of salsa at a frenetic celebration down South Racine. The weather patterns over the Midwest had shifted so that the frigid cold had turned into a driving, misty rain that never let up. You went to bed and it was raining. You woke up, ditto. Like love for an unattainable person, as January passed into February, no one was completely free from the rain that made faces shimmering liquid and kept those same visages more awake and aware than they’d ever care to be.

Much the way Victor Tremulis felt, lying on his cot at the Marclinn and thinking about Reve. Slapping himself like the hard rain would, his memory stinging with all the things he wanted to say to her and never did. And never would.

As January became February, with spring as far away and as unattainable as the average city dweller’s peace of mind.

Richard M. Daley, Jr. looked as if he might stand a good chance of beating Eugene Sawyer in the upcoming special mayoral primary. In Iran, the Ayatollah was hospitalized for internal bleeding. And the easiest way of grabbing a cab was to wave a copy of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses at most any cab driver in the Loop. Most were camel jockeys, anyways, and they all drove like the streets were as roomy as the Kalihari Desert.

Only it didn’t rain in the desert.

* * *

Conover and Mather had been onto the scheme for weeks, since they found one of Reve’s flyers in the fleshy mitt of a fat black dude with silver caps on his front teeth went by the name of Chubby Love. The sketch of “The Painkiller” certainly wasn’t instilling the fear of God in the street crips; another empty chair was found, no signs of a body or parts thereof, off Beaubien Court, near the Prudential tower.

The leather on the chair was smeared with something the lab boys said was a mixture of hair tonic and analgesic balm.

It was Conover all on his lonesome, though, who was walking the streets of the North Loop this night, the 19th of February. His size ten brogans slapping cement, his second change of socks that day already soaked. Three civilians out trying to avenge their friend Surfer’s death. Fucking rain. Least he wasn’t wearing glasses. Had the Wayfarers back in the squad, but where the fuck had the sun been in a month, anyways? He crossed Monroe and spat onto the curb. Fucking look at that. The city still had their reindeer up top of the El station on Wabash. Dumb shits.

Conover looked up at the lighted buildings, the Polish cleaning women from Bridgeport and Brighton Park still busy scrubbing, the dashes of light resembling negatives of a word processor’s screen in extreme close up. The rain hitting his face like a horny, playful bitch.

Wondered about Reve and the street crips. Man, what would he do if his dick didn’t work? And damn if his little sprout became the Jolly Green Giant when he thought about Reve Towne and her black hair falling over her face as she straddled him, then brandished her pussy his way.

And that was what made him make up his mind to approach that loon Shustak about the girl and her likes and dislikes, etc. etc. What the hell, she wouldn’t go out with him if he cold-cocked her with the question.

He had passed the guy with his beige blanket wrapped around him like an Arab with an identity problem earlier that night. He had set his chair out in the Arcade Place cul-de-sac, near St. Sixtus, the church where Mather always took confession in.

Conover purged himself at The Touch in Fallon Ridge, if you can anticipate the thrust.

And most whores from the Ridge to the go-go palaces of Cal City were resigned to anticipating Conover’s sweaty grunts.

He blew out a plume of breath and let the rain hit his open, unblinking eyes. His eyelashes were plastered to his skin. Yes, Chicago did have some good thinking weather. He wanted to jazz Reve Towne in the worst way.

* * *

Yea, Smooth Tee had the Dream’s moves down pat. Truvillion’s friend followed Shustak’s route past the American National Bank toward that funny little alcove with the cobblestone bricks leading up to Popeye’s Chicken.

Dude called hisself the American Dream, the Tee say. ‘Merican Clown was more like it. The guy was a laugh. A fucking riot.

Now he’s been ridin’ around town in his chair. Jesus Lord, I is wonderin. The man clapped his hand to his face in an exaggerated manner. Lawsy, could he be tryin’ to trap the evil Mister Painkiller?

Shee-it. Doin’ it fo’ a month now, so you ain’t workin and you must be getting your jingle from somewheres. Get a hefty price on those pills you be carryin. Yea, Ray Lewis got you pegged. Wonder who took the time to name you, you fucking faggot. Cock suck man, it was cold. Cock suck.

“I’ll be givin’ you some pleasant fuckin’ dreams,” Ray Lewis, a lazy ass grifter from Whiting, Indiana, whispered like he was a strongarm tough. He smiled and the rain hit his yellowed teeth. “Oh, yea. Cock suck.”

Maybe he’d even keep the blanket when he was through.

* * *

Shustak was feeling dismal, a guy scrabbling away from a disintegrating cliff. His pain was at a lull, numbed by his depression. It helped to squeeze one eye shut and concentrate on those muscles used to keep it up.

So Mama Tomei’s had been a washout, so the killings were still going on. He couldn’t be everywhere. And with Vic Tremble covering the subway end of it.

And no one in the city knew who the Painkiller was. Daves and Petitt had no leads at all. He thought that, in this day and age, a relative or drinking buddy would dime on him.

Where I am is what I am, he had told Vic Tremble once. Well, where was Frank Haid? Where was the Painkiller?

He had gotten used to the blanket and the feelings of helplessness that someone in a chair would have. But he wanted to wear his uniform. He gripped the blanket. He wanted to take a pill. He wrung the wet blanket in his fists.

Thinking it was the Painkiller’s neck, the ruptured arteries spraying his hands, helped enormously.

A fighter battered by February blows.

A fighter who stayed in for the kill.

* * *

“You the American Dream, I be right?” Lewis figured to go into it this way, like kinship and we is all brothers shit.

Shustak looked up, cautious yet curious. A grateful fan out on a night like this? No, his cover wasn’t blown yet.

“I said, you the American Dream?” No longer flashing teeth.

The man in front of him wasn’t the Painkiller. Haid was white and older, fatter. He had used the last few seconds to build up spit in his mouth by not swallowing. He let it drool from the corner of his mouth, thicker and warmer than the rain.

Beneath the blanket, he held tight to a grey stiletto. Wheelchairs weren’t the only things Ben Murdy could procure. Drool hit his blanket. Dark as blood.

“Bbb-ghubbles yhou.” He fluttered his eyelids as if they had weights attached.

“You can be droppin’ the retard faggot act now cause I don’t be playin’ that game.” Ray Lewis twitched a tattoo on the ground. Hungry and cold as shit.

Shustak blinked. Reve had told him once that some times, things were better left unsaid. Well, he would let this guy have his say.

“Freak,” the man coaxed. “Freak Flintstone.”

Shustak didn’t think he looked that bulky underneath the blanket. Maybe it was because the guy standing there was so thin.

“Lookithere, we got us a caveman, a whatchoo call Cro-Magnum, here.” Talking to himself, not Shustak, who took him for a doper, not someone who had gone two days without eating and the rain just peeling the weight off of him.

“Pt...pi…pi...pitee.” Shustak brought down his lip with that one, as if the drool was molten lead.

Then the guy shoved the wheelchair backwards, after the last tired cabbie of the post-rush hour narcopolis dozed by…

The chair bounced backwards over the cobblestone into the darkness, the Asian Bank building alongside of them rising to meet the dead sky. The chair banged into a UPS loading platform, new pain jolted through Shustak.

Beneath the beige blanket, turned shit brown by the rain, the stiletto in his hand was a dinner knife in the fist of a hungry man. Another shove and Shustak started to act:

Bolting out of the chair, his chest jutted outwards as he proudly told the Painkiller, CRIPPLED AND INSANE, I AM THE AMERICAN DREAM. I WILL LEAVE SKID MARKS IN YOUR SHORTS.

The Painkiller stepped forward, a halo of light around an executioner’s mask with a zipper going down the center of the face, leaving only a bloody tongue exposed. When he saw the conviction in the hero’s eyes, he backed off…

I’M A NEW DRUG, the American Dream hissed through perfect, clenched teeth. TRY ME.

In his mind. All in his mind. The beige-turned-shit brown blanket was warm now, because Shustak had pissed his pants.

Ray Lewis took a quick glance over at the darkened chicken place. “Love that chicken from Popeye’s,” he sang. He was the one with the perfect teeth.

* * *

“See, I know who you are, Man.” Angry spit hit Shustak’s own.

Grabbing the armrest with both hands. Knuckles white; well yellowish-white. So close to the knife.

“See, what it is, me and the Tee be at the Fonk City and Smooth, see, he be knows the sidewalk preacher dude what knows you. Simple as the pie in your pocket.” White teeth in the shadows. Impatient spit in his sibilants.

The black man reached to his waistband. The rain beaded on his skin.

Shustak made a spit bubble. He still was thinking he was throwing his opponent off track.

Even after the guy pulled a blade of his own.

“You must be getting some kinda dis’bility from the state or sompin, you aint workin’.”

The American Dream battered the Painkiller with February blows forged from his iron will and discipline. The city would privately thank him, but publicly decide him to be a vigilante, a loose cannon. Lying on the ground, the Painkiller begged for mercy, something he never gave his victims.

Shustak frisked him for weapons. Found the acid in one pocket, in one of the plastic travel bottles that you buy to keep your saline solution in if you wear contacts. The bottle had a teal squeeze cap and was labeled ACID. The miniature blow torch and a set of Ginsu knives were in an inside pocket. The Painkiller tried to get up then, make a break for it. The American Dream rabbit-punched him and his skull cracked the ground. CRIPPLED AND INSANE, I AM THE AMERICAN DREAM, he spat. I’VE GOT DYNAMITE IN ONE HAND AND A FIST IN THE OTHER. I’LL SLAP YOU SILLY.

The Painkiller pissed in his pants, obviously frightened. Compared to the dread Eighth Street Man, the Painkiller was spineless. His mad reign was o

The black man had a knife in his hand.

“You’re the Painkiller, aren’t you?” Shustak asked like a hero would when trapped in a villain’s lair. He’d spill his whole story, how a strange meteor made him hear voices that told him to slice and dice crippled people. Or maybe tell him that he was a dentist who had gotten AIDS from one of his patients and he killed his victims with dental instruments.

Shustak readied himself, his own blade with a handle as dark as the womb and as unforgiving as the grave.

Sometimes, in this city, it was the other way around.

“Me, the Painkiller?” The hand that held the knife splayed across his chest. The starving thespian.

Shustak never had time to observe everything in that last moment. He barely had time to raise his own knife. The rain was no more than a misty tingle, much like a seizure that never hung around too long.

Ray Lewis from Whiting, Indiana, slit Evan Shustak’s throat in a clean arc from just below the left earlobe. The blade neatly slid through the sternohyoid muscle; the left innominate vein, and the left common carotid artery. The back of Shustak’s head slapped three times against the wall of the Asian Bank Building. His blood gushed onto the blanket in freshets, creating what could have been a pool of gravy in the darkness.

“Me, the nasty Mister Painkiller?” The very idea left him almost satisfied that the chump only had a few shittin’ bucks in his freak retard pocket.

“An’ you the American Dream.” He laughed hard enough that Dean Conover, walking down Madison, could hear. Ray Lewis wiped his knife off on Shustak’s forehead. He contemplated letting the body drop, let him peek around for more money. Figured maybe the dead guy had been smart after all. Only have as much as you need.

He started walking down the alley, toward St. Sixtus.

“Yea, hero and villain,” He laughed again, but his stomach growling made him stop. He looked back one last time.

“Yea,” he told the corpse. “Dream on.”

Chapter Forty-Nine

It surprised the both of them. Conover had been walking along, the rain was Reve Towne’s fingers playing in his hair and her tongue lapping his neck just under his jacket collar. He heard the voices, heard Lewis laughing. And then there he was.

With the knife still in his hand. The rain wetting the blade again.

Conover tipped to the blade right away, and he was starting to react. That is, he had stopped focusing on an imaginary spot between milky white thighs when the blade came upwards and entered his abdomen just beneath the rib cage.

Lewis was not a strong man. He could not lift the cop off the ground. He settled for letting the blade break off inside of him.

Conover fell to the ground, thinking fragments of words. Lewis had hit an adrenaline rush from the second he had seen Conover, not knowing until the next day’s paper that he had cut up a copper. He ran west down Madison and spent Shustak’s money on a bottle and some chili in a Halsted Street dive.

Conover was on his back, the rain hitting his eyes and generally pissing him off. He tried to remember that joke Anderson had told him at the water cooler. The Jew and the other guy on the plane. Hadn’t he tried the joke out on Mather?

So the plane lands after the engine trouble, the one guy looks over at his hebe friend with the glasses and sees him crossing himself. He says hey what are you doing with the sign of the cross thing, I thought you were Jewish? The guy makes the moves again and says oh I was just checking that I had everything spectacles testicles wallet and keys.

Conover had to speed it up at the last, making his own peace with God as he finished the joke.

He got as far as In the name of the Father.

When he reached down for the and of the Son part he realized that one he had a hard-on and two he had pissed himself and then he was dead...

Chapter Fifty

Ninety percent of the time, the Chicago Tribune will relegate the daily news stories to grace their front page to include national news, such as a coup in Liberia, Lebanon hostage talks, and the like; and local news if it involved politics, Chicago being a political town, in case you just fell off of a turnip truck. The going in-joke come voting days was In Cook County, Vote Early and Vote Often! Any other local news was saved for Section Two, the Chicagoland portion of the paper.

There are exceptions to the rule, say, for example, when a cop is killed. Now, Dean Conover was off-duty and should have been in Section Two, but the thing had snowballed into a Painkiller-related story. The Painkiller always made the front page because if the murderer was not caught by the upcoming election, well...

The above fold headline for the February 2nd Trib ran this way:

Off-Duty Cop Slain by Painkiller

An officer from the 16th District was slain in the North Loop late Monday evening, apparently after encountering the elusive murderer stalking the downtown streets since November.

Dean Conover, 34, succumbed to stab wounds inflicted in the 150 block of West Madison, and was DOA at Henrotin Hospital. There were signs of a struggle, according to Malcolm B. Dennison, a pastor at St.Sixtus Franciscan Church, near the scene of the crime. Several feet away was the intended victim, an invalid in his late twenties, tentatively identified as Evan Shustak, no known address. Dennison discovered both bodies.

Early reports from Frank Bervid, who examined the first victim at the scene, said that the slash wounds were “similar” to those of the lurid serial killer whose prey has been handicapped street people confined to wheelchairs. The Assistant Medical Examiner would offer no further information until a proper autopsy was performed.

This brings the number of known, and suspected murders attributed to the one known to many as “The Painkiller” at fourteen.

“That number is very high, and I think it is very much out of proportion,” said Area 3 Homicide Det. Lt. Jackson Daves. “I wouldn’t be surprised if this was one of those cases where the killing of Shustak was copycat, and the off-duty officer just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Officer Conover was the recipient of fourteen Honorable Mentions since starting on the force with the Traffic Division in July, 1984.

Victor Tremulis never cut articles out of anything, mostly because he would never know when the urge to nip at his skin with the blades might come upon him. Instead he folded and ripped the pages; the lower half of the Tribune article was ripped horizontally against the grain. He tacked the jagged page onto the wall of Shustak’s room opposite a photocopy of an ad from an early fifties Batman comic, where the Caped Crusader and Robin were asking for donations in the area of polio research.

Evan Shustak, Chicago’s American Dream, had been dead for one week, with only a few knowing the true circumstances surrounding his life and death (like in a comic book, he supposed) and the wheelchair he had ridden in, along with the beige blanket, was stored in a room marked EVIDENCE in the basement of the James J. Riordan Police Headquarters at Eleventh and State.

Maybe it was: sitting alongside Mike Surfer’s old MediaComp chair, down there in the evidence room, joined again in death. Along with bags of controlled substances and other sundry things.

Control was something Tremulis was losing, as every minute stomped by. “You always thought that we would have stopped him, Evan.” His voice rang as hollow as a side view of his face.

“We. Us.” The two words sounded like a weak gas leak.

It was only him and Reve now. Shustak’s corpse wasn’t even around: when the ghouls at County were done with it, an Aunt Kim Something paid for his body to be flown back to Tempe, Arizona. It seemed fitting that the relative lived on Ash Street.

How the hell was it that Evan Shustak had ended up in Chicago? Now there would be no future episode where someone stood over a Chicago graveside and recounted, “The Secret Origin of The American Dream.”

And the minutes kept stomping on by, reminding Tremulis that he was still part of the passing parade.

* * *

Reve Towne worried about the man whose name she still thought to be Vic Tremble. She suspected it to be a nickname, and also expected him to never have the courage to tell her his real name. And her grief over Evan’s death had not scarred over, as well.

The city he had lived in had forgotten him in the wake of Dean Conover’s funeral. But she would always remember, as Vic would, perhaps a little too much. Since the incident, Vic had stopped going out on patrol. She didn’t blame him. Shit. She was certain that even the Painkiller was leery of showing his face after the publicity his last attack had garnered.

Reve also wondered, sitting alone in the living room of her apartment, if Evan had been any kind of a hero back in Arizona.

And now she was thinking about the only other survivor, a man behind another mask. A man currently contemplating the end of he knew not what.

She took the bus to the Marclinn, knowing he would be there. A man on the street accused her of looking full of piss and vinegar.

Walking through the doors of the Marclinn, she found the lobby vacant. It was like the Marclinn’s “family” was unraveling. With individual threads weren’t being sliced away by the Painkiller. She looked across at the leering faces of the Fates.

Edgar Chuso sat in one chair, watching a blank television screen. What destroys people’s lives so easily?” Reve said aloud, and it kind of jumpstarted the old fart.

But all he had to say was, “Eddie come Beddy come Freddy come Steady...”

* * *

Victor Tremulis was to descend one last time before going back down into the subway. It was too cold for the Painkiller to go anywhere else. Evan Shustak was dead and there was nobody else on the streets to kill. Badaboom. badabing, simple thinking, really.

He would be waiting.

Tremulis descended in a way such as this:

There were parts of the American Dream in this room the small one window room with its view of the neon Magikist lips was as cluttered with parts of a whole as Tremulis’s own mind. Makes sense if you let it.

He looked at the arm bands, the surgical gauze and the rolls of Scotch tape. But it was the fragments of fiberglass casts that interested him the most, out of all the medicinal carrion that lay in the beveled shadows. He had forgotten how long it had been since he last spoke. With Etch at the Coke machine. That must be it.

Now he had to ready himself for the pain ahead, or rather, below. Self-mutilation was the only thing left, now that Shustak was dead, that would give him the needed strength. For he was too cowardly even now to ask Reve to help him through to the end.

Mutilation. And he knew how to do it. What Chuso had said so long ago had made sense. He sucker-punched Shustak into playing the ultimate hero, while he, Tremulis, capered in the tunnels. And for what? In Chuso’s own sage words, why didn’t he just corner Reve for a sympathy fuck and get it all over with. Then move on, go back to washing glasses at the Hard Rock Cafe, go back to being shit on by everybody and their aunt.

He fumbled amongst the ruins of Shustak’s life. One of his lives.

“I’m pathetic,” he said. One last time and then it was past. He found what he wanted and it was just his size. “I’ll make it up to you, Evan.” He spoke in afterthought, like Bruno Bicek might’ve to his gal Steffi Rostenkowski in that Algren book, Never Come Morning.

Morning would come, all right. It would come down there in the subway tunnels. After he was through with this.

christ oh christ give me strength

The fiberglass cast—pressed for an answer under different circumstances, he might have guessed that they stopped using plaster around the turn of the mid-eighties—was as simplistic in design as paper mache, yet as tough as, well, as fiberglass. As a child, Tremulis had been in an art class where the kids blew up balloons and plastered strips from the old Chicago Today afternoon paper around them. They were then painted in primary and secondary Tempera colors. Miss Camit called them African masks. Damn it, Camit, cram it. The chant of the third grade class, led by Sturenfeldt and Sabatino. They had called him Bean-Head.

The cast was loose enough to fit over one arm, the hardened mesh crisscrossing between his thumb and forefinger. Only slightly heavier than the “African masks,” after the balloon had deflated. It ran up his arm the length of an evening gown glove. The cast was a remnant of a “case” Shustak had referred to as Reflections In A Golden Jumpsuit. Tremulis had forgotten the specifics, if there ever was any.

But he remembered his. Shustak had his patrol logs, and he had his journals. He was thinking of a specific one. A discipline. Constant learning, good or bad. Perverted or logical.

Tremulis began sweating, or maybe resumed sweating, as he thought about that journal, the one labeled “This Is My Body.” He looked at the cast and tentatively flexed his muscles underneath and he was sweating inside the cast and he remembered identifying the body not Shustak no Mather had, done that right after he eyeballed his own partner. Hell Street Blues. His own body this is

my

and he sweated more still and now the cotton behind the mesh was sweating as well and it felt moist and stale as any of the Fallon Ridge whores or the Club Cheetah table dancers no no he didn’t no he didn’t want to think of Reve throw the cast away cast the stones into the sea oh he had the stones to do this he didn’t see the hamper

his pants were down then too around his ankles shit-stained underwear skids his dick flaccid as the faces walking in the lobby downstairs his testicles clinging together he was scaring them with his thoughts he reached his arm out his elbow pointed outwards

Lowered his hand to the space between his shorts and his penis.

Grabbed his cold dick roughly with his free hand.

Moved the crack between the fiberglass cast and palm closer.

Closer still, a stray wisp of cotton tickling his penis head in the foreplay of the deranged.

He pushed it in gently, the dead thing flopping back in half, like an inflatable clown. Soft always soft he winnowed the flesh in winnowed the minnow and the weather started getting rough he was kneeling like a bum with a good friday face terror piss dribbling clear and vitamin-free inside the cast and he felt wetness red wetness on his supplicating palm.

* * *

“Bet your friend Vixtor is down the hall pretendin’ youse gots a chicken leg,” Chuso was saying.

“Excuse me?” The man totally baffled her. He stood next to Reve, almost blocking her path. Grinning sickly. He was holding a pack of Chux disposable diapers.

“I knows,” Chuso said in his sage way. Reve wondered where Slappy and Karl and everybody else had gone. It was like everyone was gone, fleeing away from the Painkiller. Everyone except Vic Tremble.

The only one left who didn’t leer at her like a construction worker.

The only one...

“He be in the Dreamer’s room,” Chuso said, rocking back and forth, gumming his lips. Smiling.

* * *

She knocked on the door and maybe it was a mistake or maybe it was fated to happen but she opened the door then as the blood made a tiny pooi and there was blood in the fiberglass mesh so little blood, really, and blood on the tips of Vic’s right fingers where

he

was

pushing

and panting he tried to stand, knowing full well that the gaping Reve couldn’t possibly know the affirmation of his actions, his pants pulled down around his ankles from his humping air and he wobbled

opening his mouth nowhere near his climax of pain and tripped over his clothing and fell to the floor fracturing his wrist and mashing his testicles into pulp. ‘

Ass up, blubbering to the floor, his teeth on the tile.

She would never forget the stare that he slivered into her or what he said then for as long as she lived. Vic Tremble AKA Victor Tremulis AKA Bean-Head

said: “This is my body and I can do with it as I want.”

* * *

Reve Towne backed away then, kept backing away until the red became a blessed black. Backed into the darkened hallway like the last, strangled whisper of a onenight stand.

I never saw her again.

The Epilogues

Epilogue One:

And of the Son

Never saw her again, huh? How long you say it’s been?

I don’t know. I lose track of time down here. Guess it’s still cold up on the street, huh?

Like a bitch’s stare, dude. Weird story, I tell you. Shit, I tell you, my buddies I hang with, they’re waiting for me at Tommy Guns, on Wabash...

You don’t have to explain to me. I’m not your keeper.

Well, take care, uh, what was your name?

I didn’t give it. And thank you for the dollar.

Worth it. Maybe I’ll see you again sometime.

Maybe.

Shit. Gotta book if I’m gonna make it on time.

* * *

I’ve got a book, as well. It will be my last journal. I am calling it Beside Myself, With Fear. I write it most of the time, like now, but sometimes I talk it. I know this because people tell me to shut up.

The swelling has gone down in my balls, but my wrist is fractured. I am wearing one of The American Dream’s wrist braces but I know the healing is bad.

I used to believe that my life was such a novelty. By that, I mean, well. Let me put it like this: I never had to answer to anyone. Not a living soul. Thirty-six and single. Though I still live—lived—with my mother and father, I am—was— as independent as the men steepled against the outer walls of the parking lot separating the Pacific Garden Mission from the 666 Lounge.

Oh how I used to envy them. Only intangible things like the weather and lost hope slowed them down. And even then, not for long.

Just weeks, or maybe it was months, ago, I could be so cocky, standing there on the Sheridan bus like a CEO with dirt on a competitor, looking down at a seated woman, staring at the pink ridge where her eyelid met her contact lens. Metaphors spinning in my mind like my mother’s own lost hopes, expectations that would most certainly keep her corpse spinning in the grave, as well. To calliope music, no doubt.

I read once that no house exists that was not first built on human bones. My past, the foundation of my present—

I peel back a rind of flesh from my finger to enunciate NOW!—is laid atop a carnival of souls. Both living and dead, mind you. Mike, Reve, Evan. All gone.

Except for me and the Painkiller.

I once applied for a job as town clown of Elgin, Illinois. Bingo by name; smirk now and charge with your sanity express gold card. Then watch the crowd demand payment in full. I babble on in Babylon because my fingers have gone numb in my right hand. I think I really fucked up that famous final scene with Reve.

My thoughts revolve and evolve. Motes which, instead of tumors, were simply bloated memories. A domino line of girls: Donna and Sharon whose parents own the textbook store and Natalie and the blond girl on the Belmont bus with the cleft in her chin. I wanted them to be fatal things. But they were parasites. And now I am beside myself, with fear.

I am a fetal thing. I stand by my fetal, infantile self. Breathing adult guilt into baby ears knowing not to expect playful grabs in return. I bring my knees up to my chin, but still my dick is exposed. The testicles lie dangerously close to the shadow of my right thigh. They are raw with the sting of the subway touches and other horrors, the ones witnessed by Reve Towne in the last seconds of our life together.

* * *

The subway ads are for the Gala Holiday issue of Penthouse. I thought it was already 1989 when I came down here. I eat chocolate and read graffiti. MARCOS, HE IS BAD MAN. niggertown that way++++÷+ Stacy Fucks Anything, Even Freaks. 641-C UNT. DENNIS CASSADY SLEEPS IN PERDITION 11-11-1985. THIS TIME FOR KEEPS.

allinthewristwithadeckoracuecanyoureadthisatall ???

I have a bottle of Stress-Tabs that I found in Shustak’s room. I remember up in The City, the iron or beta carotene would turn my piss bright yellow. Down here it looks the color of a beer that has been nursed too long. But the damn pills keep my hunger away. Maybe they’ve got caffeine in them, I don’t give a fuck either way to look on the label.

I saw one of the police officers down here a few nights back. Mather, I think his name is. I’m not certain that we ever met, but I remember Reve... someone talking about him and the dead one, Conover.

Warned me to be careful. The Painkiller came up for air again. Probably missed reading the paper that day, ha-ha. I asked him how the guy was getting away with so much. Mather said the guy was the luckiest fucking man alive, is all. He’d have to slip up sooner or later.

I almost told him who I was, asked how... well, how it was up in The City. But I didn’t. He did mention that I should get my wrist checked out. I smiled at him, nice-like.

A newspaper on the ground says to me that it’s March 12th.

* * *

Does Mather really think that the Painkiller is normal enough that he could make a mistake? He certainly hasn’t met Lullaby and Goodnight. What would he say if he was presented with the opportunity to stick his thumbs under her eyes and then fuck the empty sockets? Would he still think the Painkiller like Every Mother’s Son?

* * *

There was an autistic boy with blond hair who would be dropped off by an adult almost every day. He would always wear striped shirts, invariably with hues of green or blue in the patterns. Perhaps the vertical stripes were supposed to make him look thinner. See, most everyone I’ve ever seen in a wheelchair gets a bit of a paunch. Nobody would call them “love handles.”

There is an underground pedway—pedestrian walkway—that leads from the State of Illinois Building all the way to the ICG-South Shore railway line. At one point, it intersects the subway entrance just above me. The autistic boy would sit in his chair for the duration of the adult’s workday, at least I’m guessing, and would turn on this huge ghetto blasting radio. Rural writers would call the thing a “boom box,” because, to them, the city will always be an alien thing.

And the boy would whip out a tambourine and slap at it for as long as it interested him. He could do this for hours and never say a word. This has gone on for days.

The Painkiller is coming closer. Earlier today, the Marlboro clock above the Monroe Street entrance had said it was a quarter of three, the banging of the tambourine stopped.

* * *

Was it the babysitter deSade that put the first layer of calluses over my body? Was it the neurolgists or the therapists at Childermas Research? I mocked my father’s love of simple things, his awe of new products like a spool tape recorder I got for Christmas in 1972. He taped an episode of Hee Haw and laughed at all the jokes twice. I am such an asshole. I never saw his demons, but they are beside me now. Poking in their obscurity.

My mother, on the same hand, was truly traumatized by my birth. Perhaps I was the Hiroshima of her young adult life. That is, the aftermath unbelievably worse than the white orgasm of the birth’s impact. My little breach form hitting ground zero at Lutheran Deaconess, now St. Mary of Nazareth.

Breach baby, breach baby, there on the sand... She loves me inconsistently and sometimes unconvincingly, but it is more than I have ever given myself in return. She frets about me when I am on the street—at least, she used to. God knows where they think I’m spending my Daze now. While I lie with my ink pen because it builds my character and separates me from the bovine faces in this city’s abattoir. Chewing their cud nine-to-five-to-oblivion.

I should instead slit the sac of my testes with the pen and lap at the juices while I am waiting to die.

Oh say, can you scream?

* * *

I don’t need a wheelchair.

Tha’s good. (Voice belongs to a Mexican laborer from Maxwell Street.) .

Once I envied people in wheelchairs like this one.

Tha’s good. Que?

No,I— (The Mexican waves me away like he would an ill-thought racial comment on the street up above.)

* * *

You! (To another.) I did. I envied them. And you know why?

You gots blood on yo’ hand.

Yes, I do. It was because I had to have everyone know my Pain. (train goes by on opposite tracks northbound, layers of clothing flap) because they received all the sympathy and I got nothing not one damn thing.

Mo’ excuses than Carter’s got pills, man.

My mother says that! How about that. Now, if I can’t kill the pain, I’ll kill the Pain.

Shee-it, man, yo’ rectum bleedin’.

* * *

Sometimes I feel that I must inhabit the last continuum of pain, It’s a place where you are uncertain that if you try to kill yourself, you get into thinking that your entire existence maybe asuicide’s afterlife. Who’s to say? Tonight, the only background music is love themes of the damned.

The tambourine man’s name was Kanarsky.

When I turned twenty, I scraped a revolver across my teeth. Moved the flesh of my nose, made like I was a pig. The gun was at a neighbor’s house and I felt safe in knowing that Mr. Viduna always kept the gun loaded with at least three bullets.

I’ll never get any further away from this city than Fallon Ridge but if I was on a plane to Seattle or Tucson and it was going down in flames I’d say to the screaming face beside me Mother I’m sorry I’m on this plane that’s going down I’m dead Mom I’m dead.

I’M DEAD NOW. Spent all my life hating everyone and now my rectum really is bleeding and I’m spent and wasted as the neon in Cal’s Liquors on Van Buren. I can truly understand how some black men can hate all whites or why Jews don’t want to let go of World War II’s atrocities.

People do reality because they can’t handle drugs. Last guy I talked to gave me a little pint of Night Train and I pulled from it, draining it against my teeth like the characters do in all the stories Etch told me.

To see the show, you have to be the show.

And I could do this forever. People are starting to dress for warmer weather. A sign across the tracks tells me in English and in Spanish that I cannot get AIDS by touching a door knob.

* * *

(A wino approaches.)

You nuts.

I make as much sense as you do.

Course I been drunk better part of my adult life.

I’m sure as hell not doing this for you!

Whatever you talkin’ about, I didn’t ast to be saved.

This is my tissue, given for your freedom. This is my shit which was shat for all of mankind.

Go on. You crazy.

* * *

Days later:

Everybody is dressing for warmer weather but all the songs say people are going to California. Sixteen vestal virgins leaving for the coast. The three men I admire most, the father, son, and the holy ghost. Well, we’re going to Surf City, where it’s two girls for every boy let’s race all the way to Deadman’s Curve.

They’re out there having fun. In that warm California sun.

(A voice from behind. The smell of hair tonic and therapeutic balm.)

I can make you warm.

* * *

Givers of pain and rapture please oh please give me the strength to do just this one thing right givers please of pain and rapture christ please christ on the bleeding cross...

Vic Tremble (for the duration now) looked up and over his left shoulder, the scrap of paper he had been writing on in pencil fluttering away to haunt somebody else. Even as he turned his head, Frank Haid was moving into position in front of him. Their eyes met, blind on blue.

“You’re him.” Tremble whispered with awe.

“Yes, my son.” Haid made a show of looking around, saw no one worth worrying about. “Have you been waiting for me long?”

“You run out of bodies or what?” Tremble was buying time, building up his courage. Trying to forget about the hunger and the blood and the blackness batting at his vision. He—the Painkiller—looked very much like his sketch. Unlike himself, the killer looked well rested. Older than he thought, his grey hair had faded to white at the temples. Tremble saw a pink scalp, untanned. It was springtime, though. Again, he guessed. The Painkiller was wearing a bright blue jacket with the team insignia of the Chicago Cubs. Clean-shaven, from his sitting position, Tremble saw a couple of spots underneath his jaw that the killer missed. Eyes icy with homicidal innocence.

“You seem bitter.” When the killer spoke, Tremble noticed, he touched the right corner of his upper lip with his tongue.

Tremble stared him down, waiting for a move. Any move. There wasn’t anybody to see. Everyone steered clear of him in his chair. You talked to yourself on the street or in the subway—didn’t matter if it made sense or if you thought you were a vampire or Dr. Jekyll—all it meant to everybody else was that you were hipping them for a handout. Tremble’s self-mutilations and general babbling kept even the most naive and curious away.

“How many?” he asked, mouth taut as a ventriloquist’s.

“Eighteen gone to God.” It was more Father talking than Haid. Saying it proud.

“You mean jerked off to Jesus.” Tremble wiped his nose on the sleeve of his dirt- and blood-stained blanket.

“Are you counting Evan and Mike and Reve and—.”

Haid started to reply by asking who are they? when the passing ‘A’ train disrupted both their streams of consciousness.

* * *

So many things went through both their minds in that first instant. As if both were each other in color for the first time, regardless of how innocent the circumstances might be. To Tremble, the Painkiller could have been a paunchy guy making the pussy rounds on Rush Street. To Haid, his next victim was nakedly psychotic, his soul demanding to be taken.

A glint of the obsessive; they both had.it, like Cain the first killer and Abel the first victim.

In the obsessive. The next subway train nowhere to be seen. Tremble’s words all slurred with. Haid wanting to know who Surfer and Dreamer were. Was this another story, like the man in the sculpture told him, the story about little grey men with big, black eyes?

“What are you talking about?” He ventured to ask, but the man in the wheelchair was too caught up in his fantasy world to answer.

* * *

Been in the field so long, he’d grown a beard that was a shade darker than his hair. The sun was rising over China Beach, the pretty nurse with the hennaed bob siphoning off his pain with an IV of silly syrup, he reached for his crotch and came up empty, the Painkiller had a halo but it turned out to be headlights on an approaching train, Phil Collins was singing how he could feel it coming in the air tonight, accompanied by a drumbeat that sounded like coffin lids being dropped shut, and ride, ride, ride, that wild surf. He had been wearing a fiberglass cast for weeks now and his elbow and wrist were raw.

He looked at the Painkiller with only a second having passed, and thought of an old Emerson, Lake & Palmer song titled “Knife’s Edge.” Just a step cried the sad man, take a look down at the madman, fear the kings on silver wings fly beyond reason, from the flight of the seagull come the spread claws of the eagle the words all blurred together. He concentrated on the last two lines:

Only fear breaks the silence

As we kneel pray for guidance.

His cousin up in Woodstock, Denys Plichta, played the song with his band, Crazy Horse Road. Back in his days of the newly addicted.

Funny what you think about when you are going to die.

He winced at the thought of dying.

Haid thought it was Tremble’s pain.

He found great joy in his rejustification.

* * *

“Howdoyoudoit?” Tremble winced even though he spurted the words all into one dying sentence. There was a tremor in his little finger, the digit brushed lightly against the firm hand rest of the chair as if pushing hair from a woman’s cheek in a prelude to intimacy.

There would be little prelude to his final battle with the Painkiller, the only one that took place outside of his mind. Tremble was certain of it. But unlike a man forced into war or a beat cop answering a call in the projects, he had certain questions he wanted answered.

His heart was beating like a runaway El train crashing along the tracks. “How did you—”

“Did I what, my son?” Haid thought a gentle approach would be treacle for the psychotic man’s eyes.

“Don’t call me that! You are a murderer and I am in no way related to a murderer!”

“We are a family of man, my son. Please let me touch you. Heal you.”

Tremble’s eyes were doing a tattoo all their own, trying to hip onto the weapon Haid had to be concealing. There had to be a weapon, man.

“Yea, right.” Tremble thought of that night in Nolan Void’s. Bundy on the set, buying time. Who was buying time here? He knew they would both die here today. Here and now. Why argue the point of the killer’s homosexuality? The guy had to be queer with a mommy fixation. Play the coddling sweetheart, then go in for the kill. But where was his weapon?

“Heal you,” Haid repeated. A shout from the stairwell the next block north echoed down the tunnels. The shout concerned two homeboys. It did not concern them and they ignored it.”

Would the Painkiller kiss him before putting the blade in him? Would he kiss the lips that the blade would make in his flesh? Would he want to nibble at his ear as he—Tremble—himself wanted to with Reve? Buying time back at the Marclinn, suckering Shustak into staying above ground. So he could stay warm down below.

The detectives, Daves and Petitt, had said the guy used some kind of acid, far as they could tell. Would the Painkiller pour it into his ear after he nipped at it? Would he pour it on his victim’s crotch? Would I get an erection? Tremble thought.

His ultimate dark fantasy sated.

“Heal me.” Tremble agreed. The light was good; the Painkiller’s eyes were those of a sympathetic teacher. It was the first day of school.

“Yes.” Haid spoke it as if he was okaying an offer to pay for lunch.

Christ! It was as if the guy was standing there with the solemnity of the pulpit, waiting for Tremble to confess something, to have done anything at all wrong!

Anything: the dried blood on the blanket, his mother’s lost hope, the look on Reve Towne’s final face.

The ease at which he allowed Mike Surfer and the American Dream to slip away into whatever came next.

* * *

The moment was now, as Haid’s guard was lessened as he bent to lay his palm to rest on Tremble’s left shoulder. The Painkiller’s jacket whispered, the silky blue a springtime sky from up above coming ever closer.

Tremble pressed his lips together until the chapped red was pale as bone. Sucked on them and tasted his tooth decay. Thinking fast as he could, wanting it all to go right. As if Reve would ever talk to him again.

Was the acid in the same pocket as the knife? Did he have a miniature butane lighter? Was the blade still slick with the tambourine man’s blood? All for Reve, the last sad love letter of his convoluted life. Sign on the dotted line that is your neck.

His whole life had been external stimulation.

Terrible Ted Bundy had told a guy writing about him, in one hundred years, who will remember us anyways? The Painkiller was an external stimulation of the last six months of Tremble’s life. The sign behind the Painkiller—across the tracks, an ad for Nike’ shoes—summed it up.

JUST DO IT, it read.

* * *

He’d make his move before the killer could pull out his knife or acid. Christ, the Cubs jacket was thin. Where were his killing tools?

“You’re dead, Painkiller.” Tremble stood up, the faded blanket falling to the cement. He bunched the toes in each foot to get the feeling back.

“You...you can walk,” Haid said, backing up, seemingly in awe of the new circumstances. The heels of his shoes were dangerously close to the edge of the El platform.

“And better yet, you bastard,” Tremble hissed it out. “I can push!”

He struck out with his stronger arm, the left one, hitting Haid just above his right nipple. It was Tremble, then, in awe of the new circumstances when he watched his arm go into the Painkiller’s chest. Still, the givers had allowed him the strength of those fallen—that he might avenge them, you hear that, Reve?—to grab with his right arm for purchase on the armrest of the wheelchair.

For a moment it seemed that someone had duct-taped an invisible ball into Tremble’s mouth. Haid noticed this even as the full realization sinks in that the man with the arm in his chest could stand on his own two feet without folding up like his childhood Colorform figures, his palsied fingers unable to keep them steady.

All Tremble could do was stare mutely as his arm extended into the Painkiller’s chest, the feeling as thick and oily as wading in the shitty waters of Lake Michigan. He did not expect the darkness to be cold, because that was the stuff of comic books and horror stories.

But cold it was. Frigid and relentless as a big-breasted hooker staring at him, bored, in a Fallon Ridge stairwell. It was an ice scraper for his sister’s car with a mitten hand grip, clearing away his memory’s eyesight frame by frame. Images at 1/7 speed strayed across his mind as the

Painkiller looked down in surprise. The two of them for all the world looked like two deaf mutes contemplating a further development in their romantic relationship, two sets of eyes searching, for one stone, solitary reason not to take the final plunge.

Pitch the final bitch.

Tremble risked a sidelong glance at the tracks of his fears. The fingers within the Painkiller’s chest tingled. He looked the killer square in the face, the killer confused at what to do. Tremble thought of Chinatown. He would have taken Reve to a nice little place at Alexander and Wentworth. Ants now, it was like ants climbing over the hairs on his wrist.

Fuck the givers of pain and rapture. Fuck Chinatown and the Loop and the city in general. As above, so below. This whole story was his. A bum peeked around a pillar, looking like a corpse falling from an upright casket.

All he had to report was “Fourski and twoski is shitski.” And he was gone like that. The Painkiller had a beatific smile on his face as Tremble extracted his arm. I’m delirious, was what he thought as he stared at what was left.

* * *

Ropes of his flesh trailed into the Painkiller’s chest like cheese on a Chicago-style pan pizza. It felt cold as it slipped down from elbow to wrist, exposing grey muscle and red veins. Not a truly bad situation, kind of like putting a vacuum onto your palm. That’s what Tremble was thinking as his muscle disappeared into Haid’s chest with a sound that was too horribly like the smacking of lips.

The Painkiller didn’t look any stronger, any more radiant. He wasn’t grinning. Forgetting what he swore to himself a minute ago, Tremble sucked in a litany: givers of pain this last time I pray...

At the sound of the mumbled word pray, Haid sputtered in anger and disbelief. The idea of false gods didn’t sit too well with Father. Tremble too busy to notice this. He was watching loose chunks of muscle falling to the cement like small fish on the Twelfth Street docks.

Haid’s eyes bored into him.

“Bastard.” Tremble muttered so low even he could not hear it. He brought the remains of his left arm back, the only muscle remaining on the skeletal limb was caught between the joints like pieces of steak and gristle.

“THOU SHALT HAVE NO GODS—” Haid bellowed and the echo went down the tunnel and found a new home at the next platform. The BEFORE ME part was cut off abruptly as Tremble hit him full in the face with his ruined arm.

* * *

The bones shattered along with both their wills. Tremble was beyond caring as each individual sliver of calcium fell away from him. He lifted what was left. All but the thumb and little finger lay on the grey cement, shards of tibia and wrist bone scattered like a Halloween game of pick-up sticks.

The bones in his hand dangled from his ulnar, a string of muscle no wider than his finger wrapped around the red-streaked white like a string-around-the-pinky reminder of something important.

He almost toppled backwards, the pain like a direct heroin shoot to the heart. The Painkiller howled in surprised shock, a zealot who has had his name deconsecrated. He hopped up and down, the grey shirt that Tremble’s arm had gone through was simply wrinkled as if by static cling. The fiberglass cast fell from the wheelchair with a clatter, the chair itself wheeling backwards in a counterclockwise doughnut; the killer’s torso shook like the guy was doing the bossa nova; Tremble thought of an old Elvis song about the dance, “drink, drink, drink, oh fiddle-de-dink, I can dance with a drink in my hand.” Then he tried moving, found himself in a St. Vitus Dance, the equal to a wedding reception “chicken dance,” and he knew that he would never hear the Painkiller’s true name. As he already was forgetting his own.

He danced towards the Painkiller, readying his valediction in bone. Sometime during all this, another train had rushed by, scattering the evidence of the slivers on the ground.

Tremble grasped the ruined forearm, his right hand’s little finger at the wrist, his thumb and forefinger nearly touching halfway up to the elbow. Haid looked on in papal wonder.

This was something Tremble had never thought about. The sound of his last heartbeat, yes. Would his ears hear things after his heart stopped pumping oxygen to the brain? Yes, he had thought about that. But this— He made a fist with his right hand. The bones in the lower half of his left forearm becoming powder. The bones, broken further, didn’t snap like twigs or like Rice Krispies without the crackle or even the pop. He let his arm drop back down and saw that it had become even with his waistband. More chips fell off and skittered, fell into his pocket rim like lint. He just didn’t care anymore.

“This is for Evan Shustak, you bastard,” He stepped forward and swung his splintered forearm into the Painkiller’s left cheek. He was aiming for the eye, but settled for what he got.

Haid screeched as blood appeared on his cheek. He swiped at his face and left a red smear.

“And for Mike Surfer.” Head bent and eyes zombie-glazed, Tremble swung and missed. Pathetically, his tongue dug into his lower lip when he saw shards of his bones sticking out of the Painkiller’s chest.

‘“And for Reve Towne,” he said, falling over backwards, as in real life. The Painkiller shrieked as beads of his own blood appeared on his chest. He stumbled backwards and fell onto the El tracks but missed the third rail. Tremble collapsed into himself with what he hoped with all his soul was death.

The nearest train was a rumor away.

Seizure’s Palace

Epilogue Two

The Painkillings stopped with the murder of Chris Kanarsky—Mr. Tambourine Man—on the 22nd of March. On the 4th of April, the new mayor was elected, and after a month without another murder it was decided by the mayor’s new press secretary, fueled by dead end reports from Area 3 Homicide, that a memorial was in order.

Since the victims all met their fates in the Loop, St. Sixtus was chosen for the church of service.

* * *

Before the service occurred, though, a floater came up with the spring thaw in the South Branch of the Chicago River. “The body was spotted as a possible jumper,” Det. Daves was quoted in the April 17th papers. The Fire Department’s First Scuba Team, stationed at 324 South DesPlaines, implemented a Stokes basket to lift the bloated body. This was to avoid having frozen limbs broken off.

The condition of the body left the race and age of the body unknown. The hole where Mike Surfer’s shunt fit into his neck had smoothed over as the skin bloated with gas, and so he officially ended up as John Doe 89-6.

* * *

Frank Haid had time to think in the weeks it took his face and chest to heal. The last one had done him good, Father agreed. But he had learned something important. He could save the souls of all the street cripples, not just those in wheelchairs. The man who severed his arm and muttered names that held no meaning to Haid had shown him that. Father reluctantly seemed to okay the sentiment.

He readied himself for the St. Sixtus memorial during this time. Read and reread the ways of the breviary and the Litany of The Precious Blood. Vince Janssen’s body gathered dust. The mass would be a good one. Damn straight, numbnuts, Father said.

* * *

Dean Conover had been buried at Flat Rock Cemetery off U.S. 60 in Eastwood, Kentucky two months before. Aaron Mather’s new partner was Ileana Cantu and both were in attendance at the Healing Mass, as the memorial came to be called.

Officers Rizzi and Christopher, who had asked for transfers to the 16th District because of the scars the Painkiller had left them, would also attend. Dets. Daves and Petitt were already balls deep in a series of Cash Station shootings in the Atrium Village neighborhood.

Each night after partaking of communion with his uncle’s corpse, Haid thought how the mass would go:

Father Madsen, so serene, his hands clasped over the black chasuble, Father Dennis with his limp within him now. Father Madsen ready for the healing mass and its willing sacrifices. The arthritic and autistic, the retarded and the balding, those with cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis. Muscular dystrophy. ALS. All with fretful Sunday-go-to-meetin’ faces. Good Friday faces.

The aisles brimming with sufferers. He is resplendent in his vestments. The heavy doors of the church pressed shut by the sheer weight of the crowd, He wouldn’t save them all, but he would try his best. All that Father ever expected.

“Let us celebrate the mystery of life,” he’d say reverently. The bowl of chrism lay on the counter before him. Once the mass had been called The Last Rites, but now it was referred to as The Anointing of The Sick and Dying.

God grant to the souls of your service the forgiveness of sins that they may obtain the pardon they’ve always desired.

He tinkled the little bell, anticipating the first to come within his grasp. Father Madsen spread his arms out, the flowing black of the chasuble like wings. Everyone stood and waited for a sign. Several coughed.

In a dream he would soon make reality, the Painkiller said:

“Let us pray.”

* * *

After a time, when the givers of pain and rapture had finally deadened his senses, he lived in the ruins of the old Johnston Building, on Calhoun Place, until three whacks of a beat cop’s baton helped his decision to move.

He then took up alongside a breezeway east of the Schubert on Monroe, leaving the wheelchair behind as a sad reminder of his failure, taking instead a happy thing. Well, two happy things. The beige blanket and a faded fiberglass cast.

The first was a symbol of hope. The second, yellowed by the sun and nicotine from the many smokers who passed him daily, was a necessity. The cast became, months ago, an extension to his arm. His left limb was consumed by the killer of the cripples. The remaining nub of elbow was cauterized in some fantastical way, he still wasn’t certain how. The pain of losing the arm, of breaking the bones in order to kill his enemy, left things at times blurred. Other times, clear as the empty hole in the cast where his hand should be. The cast fit nicely over the nub, you see, and it was a nice thing to bat away memories with, if nothing else.

The cotton around the edges went grey long ago, and one night a rat climbed up into the cast’s open hole and started chewing on Vic Tremble’s arm. He allowed it to happen because it had been awhile since he had felt anything at all for any long period of time.

It was summer, an achingly beautiful day where the sun blazed the ozone away and cabbies didn’t swear and you could smell Lake Michigan in waves of déjà vu. Each office building thrummed with vibrant energy, the inhabitants eagerly awaiting the afternoon’s staggered release. And the cabbie didn’t swear. Was that mentioned?

He had dubbed the alleyway Seizure’s Palace almost immediately after claiming squatter’s rights, after a husk of a middle-aged alkie who oozed cheap bourbon and cheaper carpet cleaner pissed into the cast, then struck a match and chained two unfiltereds, then pissed again. This time in Tremble’s grinning face. He dropped the matchbook, gold and white twirling round and round into the grey and black, bore the name of a Las Vegas casino with a similar name to the one Tremble took for his residence. Way past easy.

The bluest of blues summer day became a velvet purple night with the wind whispering in ways that would have made one think it was cheating on one of the other elements. The flags above City Hall—city, state, and country—whipped against a surreal backdrop like rugs being shaken on the back porch of a Winthrop Avenue three-flat, within spitting distance of the elevated tracks. The subways smelled faintly like salt water and street musicians needed to be coaxed to play something sad. Every corner was layered with the smells of pan pizza, caramel corn, pierogi, and hot dogs with steamed, poppy seed buns from Dudley’s Carry-Outs, Mickey D’s, and restaurants whose names had double meanings to tie them in with the Board of Trade or the Art Institute.

The Theater was previewing “In Bold Blood,” a one-man show of the late-Truman Capote performed by Ben Murdy. Reve Towne, Aaron Mather and Ileana Cantu, and Nick Desmond were in attendance, but while he watched them in the ticket line, Tremble did not recognize them.

As they did not recognize him.

He was at times very talkative, particularly if you gave up a pill or a coin or combination of both. He could hip you to some very weird stories. As he had once said, the givers of pain come in many guises...

He could tell you stories about an American dream and a holy terror. Of painkillers and healing masses, old drinking buddies and concrete surfers until his eyes would glaze over. He had one particular story, hardly believable, even if you had time to listen the full way through. The story, bare-boned, wasn’t long; simply one of man vs. man with homeopathic ramifications.

Maybe you’d think the story to be true because of the way he would twist the cast on his left arm. Grab it roughly near the wrist and scratch his splayed fingers across the cross-hatched surface. Turning it round and round until you started thinking that he might one day whittle the bone nub at his elbow down to nothing.

And where one end of the cast had been crusted by grey dirt, the other end was rust-colored with his blood. Those fascinated by the blood would listen to the story long after the final curtain fell in the theater.

As long as they had coins or pills, he would talk.

And, if you were one of those who could stay and listen to the very end, you would hear the narrator mumbling to himself, a single voice amidst a madhouse defined.

Father Madsen, Arms Upraised

(and, as if in a dream, Mike Surfer’s voice whispered through the pews…)

Well I’m going out west where I belong

Where the days are short and the nights are long

Where they walk and I’ll walk

Where they twist and I’ll twist

Where they shimmy and don’t you hear me

They fly and I’ll fly

Well they’re out there having fun

In that warm California sun

Well I’m goin’ out west, out on the coast

Where the California girls are really the most

Where they walkand I’ll walk

They twist and I’ll twist

They shimmy and don’t you hear me

They fly and I’ll fly

Well they’re out there having fun

In that warm California sun

Well they’re out there having fun

In that warm

FADE TO BLACK

Wayne Allen Sallee

Chicago, Illinois

7 November, 1988 * * * 23 October 1990

About the Author

Wayne Allen Sallee’s work ranges from an interview with serial killer John Wayne Gacy to a concordance for the ABC show LOST (BenBella Books). His fiction has appeared in 175 anthologies and been reprinted in at least six languages. Sallee’s stories, five of them finalists for the Bram Stoker award, are collected in WITH WOUNDS STILL WET (Silver Salamander) and FIENDS BY TORCHLIGHT (Annihilation Press).

With a letterhead that read “I will Flatline Before I Go Online!”, Sallee held on to his Galaxie Twelve typewriter and banged out a memoir of Ed McBain as everyone else discovered what a Pentium Chip could do. In October of 1997, he bought a cobbled together computer from a guy named Bulldog and signed up with AOL. The manual typewriter was tossed into the South Branch of the Chicago River, before Sallee realized that computers could break down with regularity.

Currently, he is co-writing a comic series for younger readers, SECRET IDENTITIES, with Michael Fountain, to be published by Kalyani Navyug Publications in New Delhi, India.

Table of Contents

The Holy Terror

Acknowledgements

SATURDAY, MARCH 18th, 1989: TATTERED MOMENTS OF LUCIDITY

When a Prognosis is Just the Beginning

The First And Last St. Vitus Dance

Chicago’s South Loop:

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

PART TWO

Late Winter 1988 – Early Spring 1989

Chapter Twenty-five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty Eight

Chapter Twenly-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Chapter Forty-Six

Chapter Forty-Seven

Chapter Forty-Eight

Chapter Forty-Nine

Chapter Fifty

The Epilogues

About the Author