Kornblum blows his nose, trying not to fall apart, as Gerbil throws the S-10 into low gear.

  She pulls the truck onto the gravel shoulder. The pickup crunches to a stop.

  In the windy silence, the engine softly ticking, Kornblum dabs the corners of his eyes and blows limestone dust from his nose one more time with a loud honk. He tries to pull himself together. “I’m sorry,” he mutters into the bandana.

  “That’s okay, Andy. I understand,” the big guy comforts him, patting him on the shoulder. “Listen. Back to the two things I want you to think about. You don’t know me. But the thing is, I know all about dying. Fact is, I’m coming up on my fifteenth anniversary in the business.”

  Kornblum looks at him. “Pardon?”

  Oswald gives him a grave nod. “Yep. I used to offer up my services to a certain clientele. Sort of alleviated people of their lives for a living. You follow me?”

  A pause here, as Kornblum stares at the guy with the ugly scar on his cranium. “Oh... right.”

  “Which brings me to the two things I want you to think about. Next time. All right?”

  Kornblum nods obediently and waits.

  The big guy does not blink. He holds one index finger up. “Number one is Courtney.” A pause here, for dramatic effect, as the Indian reaches for the door handle with his free hand. “Number two…” he says, holding the second finger up, “is Tiffany.”

  Kornblum has begun to reply when they hear a loud metallic click.

  The passenger door bursts open, and Oswald grabs Kornblum’s Izod shirt, yanking the emaciated man out from behind the stick shift, then across the bench with the force of a threshing machine. Kornblum tumbles out the open door with a gasp, his arms flailing wildly.

  He lands on his ass in the weed-whiskered gravel, the sun in his face.

  The big Indian sticks his square head out the open passenger window as the S-10 pulls away, its rear wheels spraying gravel. “You try and off yourself again—I’ll whack ’em both! I mean it! Courtney and Tiffany, Andy! With extreme prejudice!”

  Kornblum, dazed and breathless on the sun-bleached gravel, stares agape as the truck roars away, Oswald’s booming voice echoing: “TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF, ANDY—OR ELSE!”

  By 5 o’clock that afternoon, Derleth Bridge is bustling with activity, roadblocks set up at either end of the span, and across the east-facing façade of the quarry building. An ambulance sits at the west end now, near the quarry entrance, its roof chaser still flashing. A diminutive old Mexican man is perched on the tailgate, a first-aid blanket wrapped around his tiny little brown body.

  For the last couple of hours, the little chicken farmer has been answering questions—through a translator—about the lunatic who started the shooting match on the bridge. He has cooperated fully, and has given the sketch artist a fairly decent visual description. Evidently, in all the chaos, the old man was thrown across the pavers and quickly scurried behind the bridge’s massive trusses amidst the hail of chicken guts, crouching down in the shadows and watching the whole bizarre incident unfold before his eyes.

  But now, as the late afternoon sun starts to droop behind the Sumac, the old man just wants to go home and maybe call his State Farm agent to see if he can make a claim on all the casualties to his stock.

  Unfortunately, just as the paramedic is removing the blood pressure cuff from the old man’s arm and is preparing to release him, a group of plainclothes cops appears on the Derleth walkway from the east, their sober gazes fixed on the old Mexican as they approach at a quick, businesslike gait.

  “That the old codger?” asks Lieutenant Anna Marie Rigby, Liaison with the Chicago Organized Crime Task Force, nodding toward the ambulance, as the FBI agent and Trooper Ganz escort her along the wind-swept cat walk. She wears her trademark plus-size overcoat, its tails flapping in the river winds. She has half-moon reading glasses on, and her Margaret Thatcher bob is wilted from all the fishy humidity downstate.

  “That’s him,” Special Agent Daniel Hanover tells her with a nod. Head honcho with the Feeb’s St. Louis field office, the balding Hanover is in shirtsleeves, his thin tendrils of combover-hair dancing in the breeze.

  Hanover was called in earlier in the day when the IBI learned of the fracas at the quarry: The moment Oswald Means stepped over the dusty threshold of Carbonate Amalgamated, he was officially crossing state lines, making things a federal case.

  Now Hanover’s mirrored aviator sunglasses reflect the frightened little Mexican as they approach the ambulance.

  “Buen-ahs diahhhs, Senor,” Lieutenant Rigby says to the little man as she digs in the pocket of her good Republican coat. Her voice is toneless, humorless, a laughable attempt at Spanish in her South Side stockyards accent with its hard Rs and vowels as flat as soda crackers. She pulls out a black-and-white snap of the Big Chief from the latest mug book, and she holds it up for the old coot to ponder. “This the hombre messed up your chickens?”

  The little man takes one look at Oswald’s glowering visage and nods like crazy. “Si—si, si—si, si, si!”

  “Grahss-ee-ahs,” Rigby says, putting the photo back, cringing at a pain in her arthritic hip. A long road trip downstate is the next-to-last thing in the world she wants to be doing today—second only to cleaning up some mess caused by Oswald “Big Chief” Means. Rigby’s sister Doris is due in town later this evening, and Rigby has two tickets to the Ice Capades, which will now, alas, go to waste. With a sigh, Rigby gives the chicken farmer a smile. “One more question, Senor, if you don’t mind.” She nods at Trooper Ganz, who stands beside her, nervously crossing his slender arms against his badge. “Trooper here says the big fella was pulling this suicide off the bridge.”

  The old man looks vexed.

  “Do you know the word, Senor? ‘Suicidio’? ‘Le uerto’? You understand what I’m saying?”

  The old man stares.

  Rigby wipes her lips. “C’mon, Hanover, help me out here. What’s the word for save?”

  The fed shrugs. “Um... what is it... uh... ‘salvar’? Something like that?”

  Rigby looks at the old man. “You see this big fella ‘salvar’ this man?”

  Still with the blank stare.

  Rigby shakes her head, turns to the field agent, and mutters, “There a payphone around here somewhere?”

  Hanover looks at her. “A payphone?”

  Rigby sighs. “Yeah—payphone—you know, you put quarters in ’em, make calls.”

  The Fed is stymied. “You’re welcome to use my cell, Lieutenant.”

  Rigby takes a deep breath, her graying flip tossing in her eyes. “Gotta be a payphone.”

  Hanover stares at her. “I mean, sure, there’s a bait shop back down road—”

  Rigby has already whirled, and is now trundling back toward the Illinois side of the bridge, her liver-spotted knuckles turning white with anger as she limps along, favoring her artificial hip, wondering just exactly who she has to screw to find a dad-burned payphone.

  14.

  “You didn’t really mean it, did ya?” Gerbil Goldstein comes through the adjoining doorway, drying her stringy, dyed locks in a motel towel. She’s got most of the limestone dust out of her hair and her pores, but can still taste it on the back of her teeth. A terrycloth robe, three sizes too big for her, hangs off her bony form.

  “Mean what?” Oswald, across the ratty motel room, pushes an armchair into a corner. Clad only in his boxer shorts and Betadine-stained girdle, he looks like a mad housekeeper searching for an elusive stain. He started wearing the girdle years ago when the Wise Guys started teasing him about his weight. Somewhere along the line it became habitual, maybe even obsessive-compulsive. Now his oily black locks dangle down across his intense expression, and he moves with a pronounced limp, his lumbering movements bringing to mind a wounded bull. Something’s on his mind. Something major is going on up there in his addled brain. Gerbil can always tell when the Big Chief’s wheels are turning.

  “All that shit about whacking those little girls,” Gerbil says.

  “Of course not,” Oswald grunts as he pushes a tattered love seat against the wall. He looks as though he might be clearing the room for a dance contest. A three-hundred-square-foot chamber of sour-smelling carpet, shopworn furniture, and bad landscape lithographs, the room is the flagship suite of the Dew Drop Inn outside Galesburg, Illinois—the first roadside flop Gerbil and Oswald had come upon after dumping the dickhead from the bridge fiasco. For an eighty-buck swipe on one of Oswald’s stolen credit cards, they got two adjoining single-kings. Now Oswald appears to be in the throes of redecorating his side. “Gimme a little credit, will ya?” he says absently, ratcheting the shades closed. “I was just tweaking the guy—making sure he thinks twice next time. You think I’d pop a child? Jesus Christ.”

  “Tell ya the truth, I don’t know what you’re capable of anymore.” Gerbil stands in the doorway, wringing her hands in the towel. She is torn—maybe as torn as she has ever been—about what to do. If she bails out of this idiotic wild goose chase, she might never see Oswald again. He might get himself killed or pinched or whatever. On the other hand, she can’t just keep blindly tagging along on these ridiculous fire drills. “I mean, I don’t know what it’s going to take to get it through your thick skull that this whole deal is nuttier than a soup sandwich.”

  “At least we got one life saved now,” Oswald ventures, turning off the lights.

  “Yeah, great—one life saved—in, like, two weeks?”

  “I’ll make it, don’t worry,” he mutters as he locks the door, then turns off the flyspecked overhead light. The room is plunged into darkness. Only a lone bedside tensor lamp illuminates the cheesy interior.

  “Did you even look at a Tribune this morning?” Gerbil asks him. “There’s only, like, ten days left until the next full moon.”

  “I’m aware of that.” Oswald plops down on the bed and opens a cellophane-wrapped burrito, fresh from the vending machine. The bedside table is crowded with junk food, aspirin, booze. “I’ll make it.”

  “Yeah, sure you will,” Gerbil mumbles, flopping down on the desk chair, poking around her crumpled pack of Camels for her last bent cigarette. She fires it up with the motel matches. “Look, I’m not in any way saying I endorse this crazy fucking shit, but have you considered a group save?”

  Oswald is about to gobble the burrito when he pauses, the food poised in front of his mouth. “A what?”

  Gerbil takes a drag, blows it out her nostrils. “A group deal.”

  “Whattya mean?”

  She shrugs. “I don’t know. Here’s an example. Say we went to an Army recruiter.”

  “And?”

  “And we save a bunch of dumb-asses from enlisting.”

  He looks at her. “I like your thinking, but it would never work.”

  “Why not?”

  Oswald sighs. “First of all, what do you do with them? Kidnap them? Brainwash them? A dumb-ass is a dumb-ass—they’ll just go back and enlist the minute you cut ’em loose.” He uses the burrito now like a baton or a visual aid, punctuating his point with little thrusts and parries. “Second of all, how do you know you’re even saving ’em? They could go in, and then end up getting stationed in, like, fucking Lichtenstein guarding a golf course. Too many variables, Gerbil, it would never work.”

  “Okay, here’s another idea. Think about all the assholes out there on the road. What if we just, like, hang out down-town, like, at rush hour, like, at some deathtrap intersection?”

  “Gerbil, come on—”

  “First old-fuck senior citizen comes along, weaving all over the place, we snatch their car. Take their license. Tell ’em we’re from the Traffic Division, something like that, put ’em on a bus.”

  “Come on—”

  “Save a million people in one fell swoop.”

  “Except that I need to verify every single asshole I save. I need the math to add up. You understand what I’m saying?”

  “Correct me if I’m wrong, Oswald, but we still don’t even know how many you gotta save.”

  “I’ll figure it out.” He stuffs the burrito in his mouth and wolfs it down in two bites. He chases it with a handful of Tylenol PM caplets. He has purposely forgotten how many people he has killed. That’s how all good hit men stay in the game—they forget.

  “How? How you gonna figure it out?” She stares at the Tylenol PM bottle. “What the hell are you doing?”

  He looks up at her. “What do you mean?”

  She indicates the room, which looks as though it has been cleared for a sock hop, then she indicates the table full of crap. “All this—whattya doing? What’s the deal?”

  “I’m knocking myself out,” he says, going back to his junk food. He tips the bottle of cheap whiskey back, downing half its contents.

  “You’re what?”

  He lets out a belch, then opens a Twinkie. “It’s how I’m gonna find out how many people I’ve whacked.” He stuffs the Twinkie down his gullet, then speaks around a mouthful of creamy lard sticking to his teeth. “Get outta here, Gerbil.” He lies back on the bed, the springs complaining loudly. He closes his eyes. “I got some hallucinating to do.”

  It doesn’t take long. Sometime after midnight, after Gerbil has retired to her side of the suite, Oswald snorts and shudders out of a deep, nauseating sleep to the sound of throats clearing all around him.

  He sits up blinking, scanning the darkness of the motel room.

  Or maybe he’s still dreaming. He often dreams of the people he has killed. In this dishwater darkness it is impossible to tell whether he’s dreaming, hallucinating, or being visited by real ghosts.

  A thin tendril of neon light spills through the cracks in the blinds, faintly illuminating the furniture pushed against a far wall, which is adorned with cheap seascape paintings and fake rubber plants.

  A shadowy figure lurks off to the left. A couple others huddle behind the dresser off to the right. They appear to be waiting for something.

  Oswald rubs his eyes, stretching his stiff, creaking neck and letting out a wet burp.

  “Very classy,” the Head-Wound Kiddie-Porn Guy remarks from over by the shaded window, the top of his ruined scalp haloed by a faint, silver crown of moonlight seeping through the shuttered Venetian blinds. It’s a waxing moonlight, the lunar cycle is relentlessly moving through its gibbous phase toward its inevitable fullness.

  “Hey, everybody, welcome!” Oswald climbs out of bed with the artificial perkiness of Jillian Michaels after six espressos. His head spins. His gorge rises as he struggles to keep his balance.

  “What’s the deal, man?” comes a voice in the shadows by the dresser, a voice belonging to the Dreadlock-Wearing Drug Dealer.

  “Gather around, everybody!” Oswald waves them all out onto the dance floor. His gestures—exaggerated and broad—are reminiscent of a camp counselor trying to round up a bunch of preschoolers for a sack race. “C’mon, c’mon... I need to take a head count!”

  “Sorry about the wife,” says the silhouette of the Accountant with the Broken Eyeglasses.

  “Thank you, I appreciate that,” Oswald says, waving him over. “C’mon, c’mon... don’t be shy!”

  One by one they come forward, sheepishly glancing around the shadowy space.

  “Plenty of room for everybody!” Oswald waves them over with a big, fake grin.

  Gathering in the center of the room, their faces undulating like fizzy cathode dots on an old UHF television, they look suspicious, wary. Details sharpen: a crusted entry wound behind the accountant’s cracked eyeglass lens, a dull white knuckle of a bone showing through a mangled scalp.

  “Sit down, sit down—take a load off,” Oswald urges, gesturing at the worn carpet.

  “Dude, we’re dead,” the Drug Dealer informs him, hands on the hips of his bleached cut-off shorts. “There’s no load to take off.”

  “Oh yeah, sorry. Why don’t you move over there and give the folks in back some room.”

  “What do you want from us?” Head-Wound Guy looks like he’s not in the mood.

  “Okay, let’s see, I’ll start over here.” Oswald points at the fatal head-injury on the far left, and begins counting clockwise, across the motley crew of broken eyeglasses, ligature-torn throats, bullet-riddled napes. “There’s one... two... and let’s see... you’re three... and you make four... and that’s five... and over there... you’re six. Is that it? Six? Only six? That’s not bad.”

  Oswald stares at the semi-circle of dead folks staring back at him, some of them looking bored, some looking incredulous and indignant, their arms crossed defiantly across their sunken chests. Here they are, the faceless, anonymous souls Oswald has ushered, like Charon, across the river to the Other Side—their names long ago slipping his mind, their identities fading into visual caricature:

  The Head-Wound Kiddie-Porn Guy

  The Dreadlock-Wearing Drug Dealer

  The Accountant with the Broken Eyeglasses

  The Crooked Politician with the Neck Scars

  The Sucking Chest-Wound Gangbanger Dude

  The Bloated Gambling-Addict Corpse

  All at once, Oswald sees a straggler. “Oh... and behind the lamp, there’s Number Seven—don’t be shy, come on out.”

  Out from behind a lampshade steps a wiry, middle-aged man with a Fu-Manchu mustache and hair pomaded back so slickly it looks like a coat of Rustoleum.

  Oswald stares at the ghost. “The fuck are you doing here?”

  “Yer shittin’ me,” the specter marvels, standing there with his sinewy, tattooed arms crossed against his chest. “Yer tellin’ me you don’t remember?” His ill-fitting sport coat is soaked with deep-black bloodstains from large-caliber exit wounds riddling his midsection. The injuries are the result of an untrained trigger finger, an early attempt at vengeance-killing.