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  Binge Killer

  Chris Bauer

  Copyright © 2019 by Chris Bauer.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Severn River Publishing

  www.SevernRiverPublishing.com

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  ISBN: 978-1-951249-09-0 (Paperback)

  Contents

  Also by Chris Bauer

  Special Audible Deal

  June 1962

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Join the Reader List

  You Might Also Enjoy…

  Thanks for Reading

  Scars on the Face of God

  SCARS ON THE FACE OF GOD: Prologue

  SCARS ON THE FACE OF GOD: Chapter 1

  SCARS ON THE FACE OF GOD: Chapter 2

  Read Scars on the Face of God

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Chris Bauer

  Blessid Trauma Crime Scene Cleaners

  Hiding Among the Dead

  Zero Island

  * * *

  Scars on the Face of God

  Binge Killer

  Jane’s Baby

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  Click HERE to add Audible Narration of BINGE KILLER!

  For my grandson Evan, the bravest young man I have ever known.

  For his mother Jennifer, whose emotional strength is unsurpassed, and who will resurrect herself yet again.

  June 1962

  Rancor, Pennsylvania, the Poconos

  Maurice Prudhomme stood in line at the bank with a gentle hold on his young son Andy’s shoulders, his pay envelope jammed into his coal miner’s uniform shirt pocket. Andy, five and three-quarters years old, had dressed himself this morning with no prodding from his mother. Today he’d picked out a striped polo shirt, paisley shorts, white socks, and black high-top PF Flyers. An oversize blue baseball cap rested above Andy’s eyes, covering the tops of his ears. Maurice, like the other coal miners in line, was dirty from his Friday night shift, his pale face blackened by coal dust and dried sweat. The other men cracked wise with each other as the line advanced, made suggestive eyes at Kitty, Maurice’s sister, a few places ahead of them. At 9:15 in the morning young Andy was working on a wad of baseball card bubble gum that had secretly grown since they’d entered the bank. He snuck another stick into his mouth.

  “Andy, kiddo, that’s enough,” his father said. “Give me the rest.”

  “Aw, Daddy…”

  Three men in Army surplus fatigues with canvas backpacks, leather gloves, and rubber Douglas MacArthur masks stepped inside the bank’s double-door entrance. None of their skin was visible, but their weaponry was: two handguns, a sawed-off shotgun, and a Thompson submachine gun.

  “Good morning, folks,” the one with the Thompson said. Heavyset, his gloved hands rested the gun across his protruding belly. He gave orders in an elevated but calm voice.

  “This is a robbery. Now is the time to remind yourself that it’s only money. Everyone put your hands behind your heads.”

  The thug with the handguns left the lobby with the bank manager, a gun to the manager’s back, their destination the vault, the robber barking at anyone in his way to either move or get shot. The gunman with the sawed-off shotgun hopped the counter and commenced physically and verbally manhandling the tellers.

  Which left the thug with the submachine gun to start at the beginning of the lobby line, forcing people at gunpoint to drop their cash into an open backpack he slid along the floor with his foot.

  Andy’s dad pulled his son closer and focused on the guy with the Thompson. Andy poked his head out, prompting his dad to firmly guide him behind his legs. His father raised his hands, put them behind his head, and kept them there as instructed.

  The gunman moved down the short line. He reached Kitty, a coal company secretary in her late twenties, who mouthed “you bastard” when told to drop her pay into the open backpack. The gunman slid the canvas pack forward then gestured with his weapon to Maurice to make it snappy. Maurice removed his pay envelope from his shirt pocket and dropped it into the bag then returned his hands behind his head.

  “That’s my daddy’s money,” Andy said to the gunman. “Give it back, mister.”

  “Andy,” Maurice was stern, “be quiet.”

  “I’m just borrowing it, young man,” the gunman said, a flip assurance with a hint of amusement. He jabbed the Thompson at the next person in line to hustle him up.

  Andy pushed. “No, you’re not. You’re stealing it.”

  The thug turned back, lowered his head with the rubber MacArthur mask in close for an imperial glance at Andy through the eyeholes. The nose holes contracted a few nasal breaths, more from arrogance than from his ample girth. “Heh. Isn’t he precious.”

  Maurice pulled his son back into him, against his leg, raised his hands again. The lingering robber moved past them.

  Andy, undeterred: “You’re a liar. And you’re fat.”

  The robber wheeled, clamped a gloved hand on to Andy’s chin and squeezed. “Listen, you wiseass little punk…” He raised the butt end of the machine gun.

  Maurice drilled a fist into MacArthur’s chin, a short, crisp punch that dropped the fat man to the floor on his back. He picked up the machine gun and pointed it at the dazed thug, his finger on the trigger. “You piece of crap—he’s just a kid—” In a crouch, with Andy behind him, he swiveled toward the bank counter.

  Greeting his face were both barrels of a sawed-off shotgun. The close-range blast blew him and Andy off their feet, Maurice bouncing once then coming to rest on his back, his face shredded by the buckshot. The sepia-hue pearl-marble floor turned into a river o
f arterial red. Andy crumpled to the marble, still conscious, at the feet of the man with the shotgun wearing a pair of PF Flyer sneakers just like his.

  Bleeding from his shoulder, Andy sobbed for his daddy. The two thugs dragged their semiconscious partner and his backpack along the floor then shoulder-shoved their way through the glass doors, out of the building.

  Andy’s aunt Kitty kneeled, lifted her nephew off the floor, and cradled him in her skirted lap. “Andy. Stay with me, sweetie. Andy, honey—”

  1

  Present Day

  Rancor Savings and Loan’s lobby was old-school cavernous, with shiny chrome stanchions, glistening glass partitions, cloth chairs in aquamarine, warm pastel walls, black pens, silver chains, and a swirled-pearl-marble floor. For Andy Prudhomme, the lobby was also a minefield. Fatherless for over fifty years, and Aunt Kitty-less for over a decade, he shuffled forward in line, his and other footsteps echoing. Voices—his father’s, his aunt’s—and scuffling noises—and the most paralyzing mind echo of all, a shotgun blast, lay in wait each time he visited the bank, the childhood trauma ready to suffocate him with horrific images beginning in bright red soon followed by a deep-sleep black.

  A part-time psych nurse at the state hospital in nearby Scranton, Andy was also a full-time local business owner, his trips to the bank for his business frequent enough that they should have bothered him a lot less than they did. He looked younger than his fifty-six years, hair mostly brown, some gray, was tall, “hot” according to his women friends, hotter yet in his nurse’s uniform. His half-lidded eyes remained unfocused, directed at the floor, seeing little, remembering too much. To his right, a stretch of marble all too familiar to him forced him to blink through his private horror.

  Behind him a young man in creased khakis and a touristy Hawaiian shirt spoke up. “Yo. Buddy. You’re up.”

  Andy smelled the blood, its metallic sweetness, could sometimes see it rivering away from his father on the floor, a wound to his head that was completely incompatible with life, as real today as it had been those many years ago.

  The man behind him nudged him with a tap to his shoulder. “Hey. Let’s go, fella. Today, already. Move.”

  When Andy failed to move, the guy reached at him again to get his attention, grabbing his bicep. Andy shuddered, snapped his hand up in a reflex that gripped the guy’s pinkie finger and bent it back in a well-executed move. The bozo groaned and dropped to his knees. The woman behind them intervened.

  “Andy—it’s okay, honey, it’s okay. Stop, Andy, relax…”

  Dody Heck, burley and blonde, had no trouble inserting herself between Andy and his newest acquaintance. “You’re not from around here, are you?” she said to the tourist, her outstretched arms separating them. With her arm pushing at Andy’s waist the PTSD moment dissipated, Andy’s breathing returning to normal. The complaining tourist found another line.

  Andy and Dody did their banking in succession at the same teller, two close friends, one small town, and many unspoken thoughts between them.

  They exited the bank together. Across the street, a news photographer framed the bank’s entrance in his camera lens. Stately white columns, tall first-story windows, three stories in total, white stone steps. He depressed the shutter, held it down through multiple clicks. Andy and Dody, the bank, the mountain ridge behind it, a few parked cars, and a long and low, etched-black granite memorial all made it into the photographs.

  Andy collected his delivered newspaper bundle and magazine subscriptions from his Rancor Bed & Breakfast walkway and mailbox at dawn. In the pile, Sunday’s edition of the Scranton Times-Tribune, USA Today, People magazine, B&B Quarterly, and Small Business Owner. Inside the parlor he clipped open the baled bundles and walked the guest room circuit, dropping a copy of the newspaper at each doorstep. He returned downstairs on creaky hundred-year-old steps to read copies he kept for the parlor.

  A few minutes later he was done with the newspaper. He found the People magazine. The pictures on the side inserts for the front cover hit him like a sack of coal in the solar plexus.

  Rancor Savings and Loan Bank. Two photos, both from the same vantage point. One was present day, in color, a wide-angle shot, and was meant to contrast the second photo, a black-and-white Polaroid from five decades earlier. The words on the magazine cover adjoining the pictures: The Safest Town in America. Rancor, Pennsylvania, 1962 and today.

  Andy focused on the magazine cover, his jaw clenching. “Sonovabitch.”

  A shit-storm was coming.

  2

  Randall Burton and his landlady Loretta Spezak exited the Sands Casino’s parking garage in Loretta’s car. Loretta vouched for the ’61 Chevy Impala’s low mileage.

  “Nineteen thousand six hundred miles is accurate, Stephen,” she said, addressing his alias, another in a succession of many, all of them chewed up and spit out over the years like sticks of chewing gum. “With a beast of an engine. Four hundred nine cubic inches. My indulgent daddy bought it for me before I was old enough to drive. Garaged ever since.”

  He’d heard about her attachment to her beloved car many times. Today he’d been invited to drive it. First time ever. He’d queued up a few other firsts in his mind for the day as well.

  Randall, age forty-five, was often mistaken for sixty, older if necessary, all except for his sex drive. Mark Twain/Santa Claus handsome. Premature white hair and a gray-white beard contributed to his image. He wasn’t complaining; the coloring came in handy. He could go full senior in seconds. For Randall, life was good, excluding one part of it: he was dying.

  He’d felt crappy. Tired, out of breath, and with a persistent cough. A clinic diagnosed his anemia first, then they handed him his death sentence: Stage 2 pancreatic cancer, at the moment still localized. Without aggressive, cutting-edge procedures, it would progress. Procedures he couldn’t afford, at least not as a free man. Procedures he might expect to get in prison, considering this was where he would probably end up. Guinea pig medicine or the death penalty: one way or another, prison would cure him.

  As a boarder in Loretta’s suburban Allentown rancher, one year now, he’d never been invited to drive her precious car. It took two months of chatting her up before he could ferret his way into her personal space, first as a bingo player, then as a bridge partner. A month more to gain her trust in minor matters like cashing her small third-party checks to use for their shared house groceries and her prescription co-pays. Another month of weekly late afternoon and evening trips with her to the Sands Casino Resort in Bethlehem, where he’d bankrolled her almost as often as she’d bankrolled him. He’d also gained the trust of her senior women friends, banging two of the friskier ones when the opportunities presented themselves. And the last two months he’d spent stealing Loretta’s identity. Last week, he drained her bank accounts. Then he got the cancer diagnosis.

  He had most of her savings now. Added to this was this little matter of a new charge for attempted rape of a minor, the trial scheduled to start tomorrow. His grandfatherly demeanor and appearance convinced Loretta he couldn’t possibly be guilty of the accusation. The time was right for splitsville, but not without leaving a significant impression here like everywhere else he’d lived, because this was what he did.

  One thing Randall hadn’t counted on: the despair that came with the diagnosis, and his pressing need to find one of his women, sixteen years absent, and the child she was pregnant with when she left. Regina, an exotic dancer, barely legal. Small-town girl from a burg outside of Scranton. He’d convinced himself there would always be time to find her—them. His long game: settle somewhere in the middle of nowhere, forget about his past life, then track her down and bring her and her kid—his kid—back with him. However difficult this might prove to be, connecting with her amicably would be almost impossible, considering someone shot him in the face and left him for dead when that someone spirited her away. She wouldn’t want to be found, at least not by him.

  He would arrive in Rancor, near Scranto
n, by nightfall today, and start his search. His interest in her personally bordered on zero. His interest in her child was now his reason for living.

  Loretta beamed in the seat next to him, feeling giddy from Pink Squirrels and the adrenaline high that twelve hundred dollars in casino winnings had given her. He’d talked her into letting him drive her car for the short leg home.

  “I’m glad you like it, Stephen. Driven only by, yes, this little old lady, to the grocery store on Fridays and to church on Sundays.” A vivid yellow headscarf, some Marilyn Monroe sunglasses, and the massage and facial she’d made him wait for had telegraphed her mood. “Except today, I’m not feeling very old.”