Tom Schreck - TKO

This is to provide you with written notification from Jewish Unified Services that we intend to terminate your employment on September 2. You will have until that time to appeal this termination.

It was signed by the Michelin Woman, and it finally seemed like she had won. The hardest part for me to accept was the fact that I had made it easy for her. Sure, I could appeal, but that was a futile formality that would just serve to further embarrass and demean me, and that was a pleasure I didn’t want to give Claudia.

It had been a hell of a month.

I hit the button on the machine to see who had called and I had three messages. The first was a recorded sales message about aluminum siding, which I found particularly absurd considering I lived in a steel tube. The next message was from Marcia.

“Hi Duff, I just wanted to let you know that I’ve met someone new and very special, and even though my therapist thinks it’s too soon for me to get involved, I really feel something special for this man. I just knew you’d be happy for me. Take care.”

That really was special.

The third call was from Dr. Pacquoa.

“Duffy, I called an old colleague about our days in the prison. The graduate student who disappeared shortly after the deaths was named Victor Gunner, and he was in the doctoral program at the University at Albany. No one knows what happened to him since. Don’t know if this helps. Thank you.”

Hmmm… that felt like something important, though I wasn’t completely sure how or why. Suffice to say, between the evening’s events and the Schlitz I wasn’t firing on all cognitive cylinders at this point. Of course, it was nice to hear that Marcia had found somebody special. Geez.

I was drifting off on the couch when the phone rang. It was Kelley and it was now close to one in the morning.

“You up?” Kelley said.

“Uh-huh,” I said.

“You’re drunk, aren’t you?”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

“Hey, this DWI you tipped me off to. The Foursome tells me that you gave them cash and drove them out to the Insideout to drink with him.”

“Yeah, so.”

“So, bullshit. Those four leave AJ’s every time there’s an eclipse. What’s up?”

“The guy’s abusive to a goofy kid I’m teaching karate to.”

Kelley paused. He didn’t know anything about me and Billy.

“The kid you teach karate to… let’s just leave that alone for a second. You knew this guy had a record of DWIs and drug possession.”

“Yeah, you told me that, remember?”

“So you get him drunk on the outside of town and call me when he’s on the road?”

“Yep.”

“I probably don’t want to know if his claim that the gun and the drugs weren’t his is true, do I?”

“Uh, Kell, the guy was regularly beating the kid and his mom.”

“You’re fuckin’ nuts, you know that, don’t you?”

“Yeah-tell me something I don’t know.”

I hung up and the next morning I woke up on the couch with my head using Al as a pillow. I was hungover but otherwise I slept pretty well.

According to the University at Albany, Victor Gunner graduated and got his license to practice psychiatry in 1997. There was no mention of his abrupt departure from the prison internship, and after he got his MD he went to a medical center in Seattle in 1998, then to a prison in North Dakota in 2000, then to a hospital in Mississippi in 2002, and then finally to another hospital in Wisconsin. Then it appeared he left the country. They didn’t have any further information than that on him.

When I Googled his name on Rudy’s computer, nothing came up. I checked into some serial-killer websites and was disturbed at the shear number of them available. Some of them were straight reference sites but others were like fan clubs for the murderers. Slashanddie. com had a listing of unsolved creepy murders by state and I checked in to the places Gunner had been to. In 1998 there were three murders of teenagers in Seattle in which the victims were drained of blood. In Grand Forks, North Dakota, in 2002 there were four slayings that involved the disfiguring of the corpses and sexual mutilation of teenagers, two male and two female. In Natchez, Mississippi, they found a teenager’s headless body drained of blood, and she had been sexually assaulted. There were four other teenagers murdered by puncture wounds who had lost significant amounts of blood.

A blood-drained, female, teenaged body was found in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, in 2003, and another was found in Waco, Texas, in 2005. The website didn’t speculate on whether any of these slayings were related. In fact, they listed blood drainings and decapitations as categories like they were hardware products or groceries. It’s a strange world.

The one section that did catch my eye featured pages of pages of copycat murders. There were at least eleven separate slayings that mimicked Manson’s work, complete with bloody messages written on walls, women with shaved heads, and weird devotion to the Beatles. Jeffrey Dahmer had some fans too, with eight different murders since his arrest in which the victim’s body parts were left in acid to decompose. Even that age-old favorite Jack the Ripper had scores of fans doing whatever they could to be like Jack. All of a sudden I felt pretty comfortable with my idolization of Elvis Presley.

I called the three medical centers in an effort to find out about this Dr. Gunner and asked their human resource departments for information. I claimed to be from a local college where Dr. Gunner had applied to teach. I did my best to sound like a disinterested human resource worker going through a formality. In both cases they gave the standard information that he was employed on such and such dates and that he was eligible for rehire. They wouldn’t give me anything else.

From there, I checked the New York State Department of Health registry and there was no record of a Dr. Victor Gunner at all. Ol’ sawbones Gunner had either died or quit the doctoring business and disappeared. Somehow Gunner was able to vanish from the face of the earth.

The stress of living and the stress of metabolizing Schlitz was getting to me. I needed to work out but I wasn’t quite ready to box. I wasn’t ready to see Smitty and the idea of preparing for a bout just kind of gave me a sick feeling in my gut. Still, it would be good to blow off some steam, so I decided to head to the Y to lift some weights. Weight training wasn’t my favorite, but over the years I mixed it in, especially when I was training to fight a heavier boxer who I’d need to push off me. It wasn’t the same release, but it was a place to channel some of my frustration.

Mostly, I didn’t go into the Y weight room because the bodybuilders and the power lifters got on my nerves. Sure, they could push enormous amounts of weight, but they couldn’t do anything useful with their bodies. They would do their bench presses and then they’d look in the mirror and scowl at the other people in the gym like they were tough. The thing was they weren’t tough and they couldn’t fight-they had huge muscles but those muscles were specifically trained to lift a bar, not throw a punch.

Every now and then one of these guys would drift into the boxing room and announce that he wanted to become a fighter. Then sooner or later he’d get in the ring and get his ass kicked by someone with a far less impressive body and you wouldn’t ever see him again. I took special joy in smacking around a guy who could bench press a refrigerator.

I headed to the corner of the weight room by one of the alcoves and brought some thirty-five-pound dumbbells with me. When I lifted I went for high reps with relatively little weight. This way I built some muscle endurance, which would help my boxing, when and if I ever got back to it. On the opposite side of the gym were four huge guys taking turns working on the bench and they were making a lot of noise, grunting and growling.