67

Bayou City

Daniel Edward Flowers Bunkowski had chosen the night to go calling, but the object of his interest, the inappropriately named Jesus, was, sadly, not at home.

Undismayed, the beast penetrated his lair carefully, the cheap lock quickly defeated by a Taylor lock-pick-gun and a few experimental tries. Chaingang's lock-smithing and invasion skills were remarkable, in spite of his first mentors’ having been failed exponents of the crafts of picking, peeling, breaking, entering, and thievery.

It was as filthy looking a crib as one could imagine. Much as he'd have enjoyed a hands-on experience, it was too nasty a hovel even for Chaingang to wait around in, and he had once lived in a sewer.

Down in the depths of his ruck he found a small rattail file. He removed a little package wrapped in huge T-shirts, shorts, and thick, 15EEEEE socks. Raymond's Nitrolite. He took the package from its nest, got a roll of duct tape, which he kept in a wrapping of aluminum foil, and slowly, meticulously, began the preparation of a homecoming surprise.

By the time he'd finished with the most demanding work, his appetite had returned. Without thinking he idly opened the noisy refrigerator to see if there might be some unopened or otherwise consumable food. Dead cockroach corpses lay stiff in funky pools of turquoise mildew, illuminated by the refrigerator light. Chaingang wasn't quite that hungry, so he unzipped and urinated into the appliance.

That accomplished, he sighed, farted, flicked the awful dew from his pink lily (what he liked to refer to as his rostenkowski), and tucked it away in Porky's and Skunkie's voluminous boxer-jockeys. He yawned, belched, farted again, scratched his enormous ass, adjusted his package, and gently set about screwing the light bulbs back into their ceiling sockets. He replaced Mr. SanDiego's cheap light fixture and the threaded retainer that held it in place, spat, tried to fart again but drew a blank, hoisted his ruck and left the disgusting crib.

He waddled back to the car, heaved his tonnage in, and drove a block and a half away, where he killed the engine, sprawled back across the front seat, and waited. He wanted to be near enough to watch the fireworks when Jesus returned, blundered into his cave, and hit the living room light switch.

He'd taken the three bulbs out of their sockets and made a tiny aperture in each, just so, using the small file. A glass cutter would have worked better, but he was able to make do with the rattail. Utilizing a fragment of stiff paper for a funnel, he ever-so-delicately filled each of the penetrated bulbs with Nitrolite, which was an explosive substance roughly ten times more powerful than C7H5N3O6, and maybe a hundred times that of black gunpowder.

The handling of Nitrolite is not for amateurs. The stuff has a well-deserved reputation for instability, and he did not know how long it had gestated in four-mil wraps under Meara's rundown barn. But if necessity is the mother of all invention then field expediency is its wayward daughter. He managed to get the Nitrolite in the bulbs without a, blowing himself up real good, or, b, breaching the ultra-fragile filament wires, which were the found-object detonators for these particular boomers.

Unfortunately Daniel had fallen fast asleep and did not get to watch Mr. SanDiego come home for the last time. He was not able to get his jollies in those seconds of anticipation before Jesus entered his domicile and went to his ultimate reward. His chainsaw snores were interrupted by a concussive force roughly that of—well, imagine being at ground zero in an arc-light B52 strike. Even a block and a half away it hammered the soles of his feet, his bladder, his lungs, his teeth. He tasted it like a mouth full of garlic. It deafened him.

He'd used way too much Nitrolite, way too much. It blew up Jesus, the house Jesus's crib was in, Jesus! It blew up the tree in the front yard and about eighteen hundred dollars’ worth of glass, and imbedded a joist in the wall of the beauty salon across the street ("We cut great head"), causing the lady who lived next door to frighten the hell out of her partially deaf husband sleeping beside her when she screamed at him, “Wake up, Vern, they just blew the levee! We've got to gather up the cats!"

Oh, well, Chaingang thought, swallowing to get his hearing back, starting the car, shit happens.

He had the radio on low. He dug at his ears, twisting his huge bull neck back and forth, trying to get his hearing to kick back in. The words, “Royal Clinic in Bayou City,” got his attention, faraway-sounding and scarcely audible, and he cranked the volume up enough to catch the end of the news item.

“—Dr. Royal is in satisfactory condition and resting comfortably at—” he paid great attention to the hospital name.

One more loose piece of business and he'd leave this low-rent shithole. He jerked his head savagely and the second and third vertebrae cracked like whiplash.