The Holy Terror Read online

  “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.