The garrote had been sharpened to a razor's edge. 1/3 centimeter wide, 3/4 of a meter in length and fashioned from shimmering aluminum alloy, it's polished chrome handles were sheathed in leather to protect the hands. The weapon was an enthusiasts show-piece and illegal in 50 states. Pitt had been staring at it for the last twenty minutes, waiting downstairs for the drugs to take effect. He called out:
Sam? Sam?!
No reply.
Sam!!
Pitt moved to the staircase, shouting toward the crack the hobo had left between door and hall. All that came back was silence between heavy snores. He pushed the door open and entered the room with the wire at the ready.
***
Friday was usually Pitt's night to hunt. This week - however - he'd been busy. Everything had been pushed back one day. He felt strange at first, uncertain as to where he'd find his quarry. Friday was free soup and day-old bread at the " Y" a few blocks from his house. The program turned his neighborhood into a veritable weekly game preserve, filling the streets with people that nobody on earth would miss. Saturday the dinner was only bagels at his Y, but St. Lukes - Baptist, wayyyy across town - had turkey and fries all night.
Pitt stalked past his Y a few times but found nobody. After a few more discrete passes, he realized the YMCA was closed, with it's windows and hallways dark. St. Luke's, he figured, rounding up the weekend clientele with better faire. He was walking back towards his place, resigned to an unavoidable trip across town, when he found him.
Actually, it was Pitt who'd been found. The man - dressed in brown-stained jeans, worn white v-neck and a humid, almost tangible reek - hailed him from a crumbling stoop across the street:
Excuse me! Sir?? Sir? Can I borrow a cigarette, sir??
Cigarettes never failed. If michael Pitt was a hunter, then cigarettes were his decoy. The days of ten-dollar packs had priced most homeless people out of the rolled tobacco market. Pitt himself had quit the lousy things years ago, but found that simply walking with a lit cigarette in-hand attracted all sorts of begging. This particular fellow had spotted Pitt's smoldering butt from clear across the empty street, and began to haggle and bargain when he saw him crossing. The bum wasn't as young as he'd seemed from across the street, Pitt noted. His slumping shoulders, lidded eyes, and rotted-sweat stench screamed opiate withdrawal.
Thank you sir thank you. Sit. Thank you.
Pitt held out three cigarettes instead of just the requested one. The bum was appreciative but obviously dope-sick. Years before, Pitt would have spent hours buttering the guy up, figuring out how best to proceed, even postponing his mission if the signs were wrong. These days, countless hours of successful hunting had streamlined his approach. He handed over the smokes and interrupted the vagrant's effusive babble:
I have dope and pills at my house, and you can stay and eat and get high as long as long as you want, as long as we can be friends. Can you...
He softened his voice and paused a beat, touched the mark lightly, high on his shoulder asking:
What's your name again?
The hobo answered right away:
Uh...Sam, sir.
Sam...Can you be my friend?
***
Truth be told, Sam was a little too young for Pitt's tastes. experience taught him that young ones were more apt to become physically violent during the process. They were far more likely to continue resisting, loudly and physically, even hours and days after resistance had proved plainly, irreversibly useless. Even so, it was late on a Saturday. Soon the sun would be down and the cops would be circling three cars deep on every block. Sam, young as he was, would have to do.
It took Pitt an hour to get the guy into the house and doped up, another 45 minutes to get him into a bath. He'd given the kid only weak, polluted street dope to cure the sickness, but spiked each of the beers he'd served the him with healthy doses of the strong pre-op anesthesia called Versed.
It was a time tested strategy, perfected over many months, and it worked like a charm on the unfortunate hobo Sam, now on spiked beer number three and babbling like a gibbon:
Sam, Hobo Sam, Sam the Hobo, Sam The Bum...
He went on and on, clearly ecstatic at his good fortune:
...And I said I'm your friend Mr. Pitt...but I ain't a faggot right? Ok? You said friends, but I'm not about to be suckin dick for this shit. I'm not into that. Not that I wouldn't, but I ain't....
He stuttered, paused a beat, added:
I'm just not gonna unless I know, um, what's comin back, you know? Like how much? When?
He looked around the room as he spoke, as if all Pitt's worldly possessions might be gifted or not on the relative quality of fellatio yet to come. Pitt shook his head in reassurance:
My friend you mistake me. Here you don't pay with your mouth, at least, not the way you're expecting. Go wash up, the bathroom at the top of the stairs is set up for you. When you get out we can talk more about what I want, and what you'll get.
Dr. Pitt intended to keep his promise. Tip-toeing despite Sam's apparent
Unconsciousness, he pulled up behind the snoring homeless man, lowered the wire, and yanked it closed around his unmoving neck.
****
"SURPRISE!!!" the guy practically screamed it. Pitt started, pulled the wire tighter, then reversed course and pulled it up and away from Sam. The kid was wide awake, laughing at his own ridiculous joke even as he sensed the new wrongness in his host:
Whoa doc. I said...I toleyou... Waif...
The words crumbled in his mouth and spilled out. Pitt had never seen a person conscious after so massive a dose of anesthetic, and stood in front of Jeff well-vexed and momentarily confused as to his next move. There was blood in a perfect arc around the bum's neck, leaking in tendrils down his chest from where the wire had bitten and released. It diluting the bath water to a darkening blend of pink and crimson. Sam fingered his neck, mumbled a lazy demand to the still-motionless Pitt:
Gemme fuckahttaeh...I can I can...whaddafug??
The homeless man's eyes bugged out as he noticed the blood and where it was coming from. For a few seconds, Pitt believed the wire may have cut deep enough to finish the job. Instead of a death-spasm, however, Sam the hobo somehow managed to find his feet. He was now standing up in the tub, barely able to keep his feet, still dripping scarlet and pink, and making loud, unintelligible threats at his still dumbstruck captor:
Whaddafugwajddafugibgoddagoddaguh...heeeeelllll!!!!!!
The bum leaned towards him, tripped on the tub, and fell - soaking and hollering - into Pitt. They hit the floor with a house - shaking thud, and now Pitt found himself crushed beneath his blood-crazed prisoner. The bum was strong from adrenaline and dope, and soon had Pitt bent over the red bath water, trembling in resistance as Sam the bum pushed with all his desperate weight. There was a complete silence as Pitt's lips, nose, eyes and ears were pressed, hard, toward the the bottom of the bath. He had a precious few seconds to ponder the sudden reality of impending death before the darkness closed around him.
Then the weight on his back seemed to evaporate and adrenaline shot through him. He jumped up and back all at once, smashing the hobo against his bathroom sink with a gasp and a howl. They were on the floor once more, but Sam's attack had ebbed quickly after the first few hectic minutes. His body slackened with the passing seconds, and after another short bout grappling, Pitt had him pinned against the floor, face down. He pulled the wire over Sam's head and around his neck, and pulled back with every last electron of available energy. Discretion and quietus were no longer a priority - he needed this man's head and he meant to have it. Pitt sensed release and pulled harder. He gave one final, monstrous heave on the garrote, as a sound like wet yodeling oozed from Sam. There was a hot gush of new blood drenching Pitt's hands and arms. He watched the red tide seep and flow for a few minutes before finally relaxing his grip on the wire.
The hobo rose again, from his belly to wobbling knees, and then - impossibly - to his feet. Pitt felt himself hanging off the wire handles, being pulled like a waterskier behind the raving Hobo. Sam twisted and spun trying to shake Pitt and his wire. Blood was flying everywhere, pulsing in long gushes from the circular gash in Sam's neck. It flooded the area, inches deep underfoot, and sprayed in great slashes across every surface of the room as the two men struggled. Pitt saw broad swatches of red and pink and Scarlett everywhere he looked, so much blood that he wondered if he himself might have been somehow wounded in the confusion, and not noticed. Sam The Bum was screaming now, through his slashed throat, gagging out what Pitt could only hope was a final death-cry. Instead, the homeless man's shrieking only grew, cresting in a red surge of volume and forward motion that brought both men exploding from the bathroom door. Momentum sent them cannonballing off the top of the stairs with Pitt hanging on to Sam like a tundra wolf collaring a wildebeast. There was another, louder howl, this time from Pitt as the two men crashed down and tumbled into a wounded heap at the foot of the stairway.
They hit with a loud "crack!". In the instant before the pain hit, Pitt found himself on top of Sam, with the wire still embedded deep in his neck. As agony went knifing through his left leg, Pitt pulled back on the chrome handles with all his weight.
There was a sound like rent gristle then, and a sudden awful odor burrowing into his nostrils. Pitt's head swam and spun, and he thought he might faint. His mind was still screaming along with the fight, but now there was quiet. He heard a sound like a bowling ball rolling over carpet, and looked down to see the Sam The Bum's head go rolling lazily into his living room.
The hobo's body was twitching and dancing beneath and blood covered most of what he saw. His left leg was pure fire. Even so, Michael Pitt forced himself up, his damaged frame wailing in prsomehow and somehow made his way to the head.
***
He left the entire mess as is, thinking that if this final project was a success, that he'd burn the fucker down and never deal with the clean-up. His leg - on the other hand - was in need of attention. He got the head to the lab only through desperate bursts of effort punctuated by long periods of furious pain. Five hours after the episode in his bathroom, Pitt was finally able submerge the head and cross his fingers. He limped across the room and pressed a series of buttons to electrify the solution in preparation. Then he waited.
His leg. As excited as he was about the project and his research, his leg - broken and useless from his tumble down the stairs - was stealing his attention. The reaction, should it occur at all, couldn't be predicted. He felt certain it would happen, but couldn't say just when. Pitt had just decided on a smallish dose of morphine to counter the pain during the process. He would have success, then he'd take care of his leg. He was almost to the door, hobbling and groaning all the way, when a voice came from the monitor speakers all along the desk under the head's container.
Fucker. What'd you do to me??
Pitt wheeled around, inadvertently settling on his ruined leg. Pain like a bullet went buzzing up through him, and he hardly felt it. Sam The Hobo's eyes were wide open, spinning in their sockets, with his head still submerged in the glass vat. Sam's mouth was working along with the words from the monitor:
What'd you do? What'd you fuckin...holyshitholyshitholyshit...
