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  TKO © 2011 Tom Schreck

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  First e-book edition © 2011

  E-book ISBN: 978-0-7387-2044-9

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  Cover design By Gavin Dayton Duffy

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  Dedication

  For the two Mrs. Schrecks,

  Sue and Annette … the loves of my life.

  You can’t beat me. I’m God!

  Muhammad Ali

  Well, God’s getting knocked on his ass tonight, then.

  Joe Frazier

  1

  “Just because a guy slits the throats of two high-school cheerleaders, axes the back of the quarterback’s head, and runs down the class president in his mom’s LTD, doesn’t make him a bad guy,” I said.

  “Duff—”

  I didn’t let Monique finish.

  “Howard’s father split before he was born, his mom was abusively schizo—shit, she used to strip him naked and make fun of his Johnson when he was in high school—and every day the football players would give him a wedgie.”

  “So every kid who gets a hard time in high school should be excused for homicide?” Monique said.

  “No—that’s not what I’m saying.” I realized I had been raising my voice. “All I’m saying is given what was going on in his head, it’s no wonder he flipped out. In a way, they all had it coming.”

  Monique gave me a look and then went back to her desk.

  A long time ago, back in high school, Howard Rheinhart went away to Green Haven for murdering four of his classmates. He was bullied and abused right from first grade, and one day while he was receiving his daily wedgie from the McDonough High’s all-city quarterback, Mark Woroby, two of the cheerleaders went into an impromptu cheer. That night, after the hoop game with Eagle Heights, Howard held his own homecoming. It meant releasing years of pent-up anger, and boy, did Howard ever make up for lost time.

  Carl the janitor found the two cheerleaders, Danielle Thomson and Terri Snow, in their uniforms, sitting in the bleachers, still in their uniforms. “Go Team” was scripted in dried blood on the gym floor in front of the somewhat pale pep squad. Carl’s been on medication ever since.

  The cheerleaders had taken the time to make Howard’s daily humiliation that much more dehumanizing. They literally cheered his abuse and they made it clear he didn’t matter. When Howard slit their throats, he proved that he did, in fact, matter quite a bit.

  Woroby, the QB, was found decapitated Monday afternoon in a field outside of town. His body was propped up against a tree, his right arm cocked back like he was throwing long, except his head was where the ball would usually be. There was no questioning the fact that Howard had a flair for sarcasm, but you didn’t have to be a Freudian analyst to see what kind of statement he was making. For the first time in his life, well, technically the second, Howard was turning the tables and letting everyone know that the joke wasn’t on him. Unfortunately, a lot of people didn’t appreciate his sense of humor.

  Class president and all-around high-school stud Jack Powers wasn’t guilty of wedgersizing Howard on a daily basis. He did mockingly nominate him for “most likely to succeed” and was leading a campaign to have Howard win as a joke until the student advisor, Mrs. Kyle, put a stop to it. Howard flattened Powers, gunning the eight-cylinder LTD from two blocks away and never slowing down.

  It was Howard’s way of saying that he would not be mocked, that he was an individual too, and that he demanded to be treated like one. He went from total victim position to total dominance in a matter of days. Sure, he went overboard; sure, he might have been better off with a little assertiveness training; and sure, one might say that his actions were a bit out of proportion. But did anyone stop to think what that guy must of felt like day after day, getting abused at home and at school and just about everywhere he turned?

  They arrested Howard in Canastota at a Thruway rest stop, listening to Frampton sing “Do You Feel Like We Do.” It’s a pretty fair bet that no one did quite feel like Howard Rheinhart back in high school. It was probably a pretty good bet that now that he had been released from prison, no one quite felt like him today either. He did his pretty lenient thirty-year sentence and was let out on time served. Here he was, back in Crawford, living in a parole halfway house and assigned to my caseload at Jewish Unified Services. The geniuses at the parole board discharged Howard with the provision that he get intense psychiatric care. He had his youthful offender status at the time of the murders to thank for his relatively quick release.

  The problem was, Howard had no income, no savings, and no friends. That meant he was on Medicaid and that his intensive psychiatric care would involve seeing me three times a week and Dr. Jeriah Abadon, our consulting psychiatrist, once a week. I am a human services counselor with very little education and a few years experience. I’m used to handling alcoholics and addicts, teenagers who get in trouble, and guys whose jobs mandate that they get counseling or else face unemployment. I’m not renowned for my skills with deeply psychiatric multiple killers.

  Howard had only been coming to see me for about a week and a half. He was never late, said very little, and acted as skittish as anyone I ever saw. I guess thirty years in prison preceded by seventeen years of wedgie-filled torment will do that to a guy. All I wanted to see the man do was learn to trust people a little bit and not go through life fearing that around the corner someone was always waiting to hoist him up by the elastic in his skivvies. Last Friday, on his fourth visit, Howard said something to me that I’ll never forget. I had asked him what he wanted out of life, and he hesitated for a long time.

  “I want to feel someday that the world isn’t out to get me,” he said and then began to cry. He cried into his hands as intensely as I’ve ever seen anyone cry, and then he abruptly stopped and looked up at me. His eyes were red and his cheeks were stained, but he got himself completely under control almost instantly. A long stretch in prison will teach you how to hide
how you feel. I can’t imagine the firestorm that brews inside of someone who can shut off emotion like that so quickly.

  To me, Howard was a guy who had known a lifetime of pain and had no skills to deal with it. His mom abused him and the kids at school abused him. The killing spree was his way of standing up for himself. For me, it was a misguided, albeit extremely misguided, attempt to stand up for himself. It sounds twisted, but I respected the fact that he stood up for himself because, to me, that’s what makes a man a man. Standing up for yourself can mean saying you won’t allow yourself to be talked to in a certain way, it can mean defending yourself physically, or it can mean a certain inner peace that tells you that your own self-respect is worth protecting. In Howard’s case, it meant some extreme acting-out, but that had more to do with how screwed-up his life had been than any innate evil that lived within him. At least that’s how I saw it. He’d been to see Abadon twice, and the doctor’s assessment was far less sympathetic than mine. He classified Rheinhart as “a low-functioning, antisocial, and pathologically insecure individual.” It wasn’t a diagnosis with a lot of hope attached to it.

  It was Monday and Howard was supposed to be in at ten. It was now ten fifteen and there was no sign of him. As usual, I was way behind in my paperwork, and a good use of my time would have been to take the opportunity to get going on it. But alas, a man has to eat, and I happened to know that at ten thirty the in-service on “Art Therapy with the Vietnam Vet” was scheduled. That meant that there had to be donuts.

  I pilfered one powdered and one plain just as the social workers were filing in and picking up their finger paints. I grabbed a cup of the brownish liquid that passed for the clinic’s coffee and slid away from the oblivious social workers filing in. It isn’t difficult to get past social workers because as a group they are usually consumed with their own issues to the point that leaving the house in the morning already sets the bar pretty high for them. The clinic’s coffee tended to affect my digestive system like some sort of New Age cleansing high colonic, but I drank it anyway.

  So far I’d been lucky enough to duck my boss. Claudia Michelin, a certified social worker who lived for rules and regulations, hated most folks and probably got into social work because it gave her power over weak people. The supermodel world had closed down for Claudia a while ago, as she had more chins than the Hong Kong phone book and sported a black curly perm just like Starsky used to have … or was it Hutch? Anyway, the Michelin Woman has been trying to fire me for years and came pretty close to being successful about a year ago.

  I was busy dunking the second donut into the coffee and cursing at the amount of white powder that had gotten all over my shirt when the phone rang. It was my cop friend, Mike Kelley.

  “Good morning, officer. Keeping the streets safe for us grateful citizens?” I said.

  “Uh, Duff, you are the counselor who sees Hackin’ Howard, aren’t you?”

  “We like to stay away from nicknames, but yes, I am.”

  “You see him today?”

  “You know I’m not supposed to divulge confidential information like that.”

  “Uh-huh,” Kelley said.

  “I certainly wouldn’t disclose to one of you heartless police officials that a client didn’t keep his ten a.m. appointment.”

  “Hey, Duff?” Kelley sounded serious, which he always did, but a little more serious than usual.

  “Yeah?”

  “A girl from McDonough High was found this morning with her throat slit. Her name was Connie Carter.”

  “Holy shi—,” I said.

  “And Duff …” Kelley hesitated. “She was the captain of the cheerleaders.”

  2

  I agreed to meet Kelley after work at our usual hangout, AJ’s Grill. The key to AJ’s is consistency. It’s consistently empty except for Kelley, the Fearsome Foursome, and AJ himself. The Schlitz, my adult beverage of choice, is consistently cold, AJ is consistently rude, and the Foursome are consistently arguing over the most inane of topics. Tonight was no different.

  “I’m telling ya,” Rocco said. “Mr. Ed was really a zebra.”

  “That’s horseshit,” TC countered.

  “Or zebra shit,” Jerry Number Two said.

  “If Ed was a zebra, how did they hide his stripes?” Jerry Number One asked.

  “In black and white TV, the stripes all came out the same, which is why the football players were always running into the refs,” Rocco explained.

  “Huh?” TC said.

  “How come Wilbur wasn’t always running into Ed the zebra?” Jerry Number One asked.

  “Hold it.” TC wanted to slow things down. “Why were the football players running into the refs? Were they watching the games on TV while they played?”

  “Remember the horse in the Wizard of Oz?” Jerry Number Two chimed in. “Was he a zebra too?”

  Kelley was in his seat, which was one removed from the Foursome, half turned away from them, watching the television. I decided to forgo the resolution of the Ed the zebra/horse discussion, and I sat next to Kel. AJ opened a longneck of Schlitz and slid it in front of me.

  “They can’t find him,” Kelley said.

  “Rheinhart?”

  “No, Ed the fucking invisible zebra.”

  “A little tense tonight, huh?”

  “What’s to be tense about? It’s not like there’s a serial killer on the loose.”

  “I don’t know, Kel, he didn’t seem like he was capable of it,” I said.

  “C’mon, Duff, history would point in the other direction,” he said.

  “It’s been thirty years, and the whole time in prison they didn’t have any trouble with him.”

  “How much trouble is a 140-pound redhead going to cause at Green Haven? He probably never left his cell,” Kelley said.

  Kelley sipped his Coors Light and watched the TV. I say “watched the TV,” but even though his eyes were pointed in that direction, Kelley faced the TV to avoid getting drawn into the Foursome’s discussions. ESPN Classic was showing the Johnny Unitas story. It seemed like you could see the referees very clearly in the black and white footage.

  “Look, Kel, what do I know? Talk to the shrinks,” I said.

  “I’m sure the detectives will. I was hoping you could give me some insight,” Kelley said.

  “Sorry—I don’t know a whole lot about Howard. The last time I met with him, he broke down and said he wanted a life where people weren’t out to get him.”

  “Heartwarming from a guy who murdered four people.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you, the guy’s never had a chance in life. What he did back in high school was his only way of standing up for himself.”

  “Wouldn’t you say that he might have gone a tad overboard?”

  “Of course—but this guy had nothin’ his whole life in terms of a family. He had nothin’ normal to base his actions on. He spent his whole life getting his ass kicked, and this was the time he said ‘enough,’” I said.

  “Uh-huh. That’s great. You’ve been hanging around that clinic too much. You’re starting to sound like the rest of the social workers,” Kelley said.

  Maybe Kelley was right, but something told me that Howard’s life and motivations weren’t that simple. Talking about it didn’t help me figure it out, so I let it go and joined Kelley in watching the Unitas story.

  Meanwhile, the Foursome had moved on. Jerry Number One was confused about Canadian Football rules.

  “Why do they only get three downs?”

  “Because the field is wider,” Rocco said.

  “What?” TC said.

  “The field is so wide they don’t need a fourth down,” Rocco explained.

  “Don’t they all have an extra player?” Jerry Number One asked.

  “Yeah, so?” said Rocco.
r />   “They’re Canadian, what do you expect?” said TC.

  I didn’t want to kick around the plight of the gridiron ballers to our north, so I got in my Eldorado and headed home. I recently had the burnt orange ’76 Cadillac tuned up, and it still didn’t exactly purr like a kitten—maybe like a kitten with a hairball issue. I headed out of the industrial part of town where AJ’s was located to Route 9R where I lived in my somewhat-customized Airstream trailer, the Moody Blue. It’s named after Elvis’s last hit, at least while he was alive. I only listen to Elvis, and most of the time it’s on eight-track tapes because in ’76, eight-track players were what the cool Eldorados came with. I take a lot of shit for being an Elvis fan, but it’s just another one of those cases where I believe I’m right and the people who don’t like Elvis are wrong. Actually, it’s deeper than that. If someone doesn’t like Elvis, at least a little bit, I feel there’s something wrong with their character or their spirit or something. Tonight, on the way home, he was singing his Dylan medley, “I Shall Be Released” and “Don’t Think Twice.” I never heard Dylan’s versions.

  I rent the Blue from Dr. Rudy, my buddy, my cutman, and an all-around good guy. Rudy has done me more than a few favors over the years and I try to pay him back, but I know I’m deeply in arrears when it comes to favors.

  Al, my roommate, greeted me at the door with his customary kick to the nuts. He’s a basset hound, his full Muslim name being Allah-King. He used to belong to a client of mine named Walanda who used to be in the Nation of Islam. Walanda went off to jail and I promised to take care of Al for thirty days, but then Walanda got murdered. Al never does anything he’s told, he’s eaten a couch, and he’s never quite mastered the whole housebreaking thing. The thing is, Al saved my life a couple of times a while back and he has a patch of reddish-brown hair on top of his mostly black head from where a bullet grazed him to prove it. Like it or not, we’re stuck with each other.

  Al did a couple of 360s, grabbed an old running shoe, and jumped up on our new couch. The arms of the couch lost their upholstery within seventy-two hours of its delivery because when Al writes in his day planner “Ruin expensive item” and puts A-1 next to it, he makes sure the project gets done. He is committed to his time-management system.