by Rex Miller
"Well, Tony Gee pulled the pin in the seventies. And what he left was Sally Dago — Salvatore Dagatina — who's still alive, by the way, and in the can. And a half-assed dope empire. The old-line Italian and Sicilian factions that had one time controlled all the gambling and narcotics and prostitution, which were under the splinter groups of Syrian, and Chink, and Latin wise guys — and the bikers — now these guys are getting long in the tooth too.
And they can't control the ethnic groups 'n' that. So you got the whole thing breaking into factions.
"Now you got your two Tonys gone. one dead, one kicked upstairs — Cypriot a big shot sitting on the national council, and Sally Dago takes a fall and goes in the slams. So all the people capable of running anything are out of pocket. Gee dead. Cypriot gone. Dago behind bars.
"See . . . Tony Gee was the last peacekeeper. He was like a, uh, orchestra leader, ya know? He pulled tile whole thing together. And with the other Tony and Sally out of the game there was nobody left with the brains, balls, and experience to keep the family unified. No godfather, like the papers are always saying. No safety valve for the territorial disputes and the faction arguments. No more clearinghouse. If you had the balls to make a move, you made a move. Never mind whose country you were in. Forget that turf shit — you went for it. So you had a mess.
"Tony Gee's lifelong confidant and counselor, Paul Rikla, and his bodyguard, James Measure, who had always hated each other's guts but coexisted out of necessity, had been elevated to underbosses with Sally Dago. Now Sally goes and you got these two Syrian dudes each running a faction of the family. The classic power struggle."
"These guys — Measure and Rikla — they're the two heads of the family now?" Jack asked. All the names were beginning to swirl. He'd just learned a whole set of California names. Now here comes another set.
"Right." Springer nodded.
"Where's Cypriot all this time? How come he's not back here taking over?"
"Aw, this is nothing. St. Louis is nickles and dimes to the big boys. Organized crime here isn't shit, and I'm not saying this to, you know, go, Oh, what a clean town we run. I just mean it isn't a big-crime town, as I'm sure you're aware. Kansas City has a little action but there isn't that much here. You got a couple things in East St. Louis, couple things north of town and whatnot, but it's small potatoes. Cypriot's on the national council. He's working in the Big Five New York families, working with the Chicago and Vegas and Miami people. He's a high roller now. St. Louis is like East Dipshit, Nowhere, to the big boys."
"Okay." Eichord couldn't seem to get his mind to kick into gear. His mouth had that familiar cottony taste that neither toothpaste nor mouthwash could stay from its appointed rounds.
"So you got die old-time consigliere, Rikla, and the bodyguard, Measure, running the family. Okay, now Rikla and Measure are both in their seventies. Oldtime warlords. Rikla's enforcer, Jimmie the Hook, Jimmy Russo, he gets killed in a car bombing. So Rikla, he firebombs Lyle Venable, who was the underboss for Measure — and you got a very volatile situation."
"So it's a purely gang-related thing, you think."
"Umm." The lieutenant's face collapsed a little.
"That's hard to say at this point. Some of the kills are so . . . random. They don't seem to fit the pattern of payback or vengeance hits but it's hard to nail it down. Like this Laclede Landing thing" — he shook his head and rubbed hard at his eyes as if he'd walked into cobwebs —"it just isn't the way you do things. You don't draw that kind of attention, that kind of heat. You don't let something get out of control like that."
The first briefing finally got interrupted by the pressures of the day's activities, and Springer passed Jack along to other hands. Eichord spent the rest of the day trying to absorb the odd structure of the Special Division, a subunit within the dozen main circles of responsibility. This was the central cog of a wheel with spokes that disected the city jurisdictionally, and it was typically complex, labyrinthine, and geographically (not to mention philosophically) puzzling to him.
As always he felt his way along carefully, shutting nothing out, the sensors purring quietly; listening, watching, feeling as much as understanding. Tactile, impassive, questioning softly, absorbent, nonjudgmental, open to possibilities. Learning, sensing, spongelike.
The cops in SD looked like teachers for sure. At least more State than street copper. No narky-looking dudes. No gold chains. Businessmen or schoolteachers in their short sleeves and ties. No gunfighter mustaches. No long hair. No fat guys. Lean and clean. State roddish. Feds maybe. Very unstreet.
Loose, but not giving him much. All business. Welcome to St. Louis. Nice meeting you. Here's your desk. This is a telephone. Here's how you get outside. This is how you dial on the Intercom system. Here's a directory. This is a map. Very rank conscious. Cool smiles and paperwork. Guys who wanted good paychecks for their good policework. Young career cops on the make.
Eichord wasn't sure what he'd been expecting, but whatever it was, this wasn't quite it. The last place he'd done any temporary duty they'd been worse flakes than the maniacs who were his beloved brethren at Buckhead. Sort of an orderly lunatic asylum. Before that he'd been working out of a metro force so corruption-ridden that it had acquired a national rep. The force was generally conceded to be one of the big three centers for crooked cops on the take. It was a thing that went back sixty, seventy years, back through two and three generations of cop families sometimes — an organic part of The Job. It was so bad there that straight cops could hardly function within the "pad."
The pad went all the way to the top, dizzying heights if you were street heat feeding the maw of a machine that reached far beyond the PC and the mayor and right into the black bag that got passed around the state house every week. When a pad is that thick, with tentacles that far-reaching, going right through the judges and prosecutors and county officials and into the legislator's pockets — then you can forget about it.
It was part of a way of life. The pad went way beyond being on the arm for the odd goody-gumdrop. This was going on die take as a CAREER DIRECTION and there were those who went for it the same way street-smart old-timers angled for a certain beat before Knapp hit the NYPD. Eichord knew his share of cops who saw the street as a free lunch for the entrepreneur with savvy. He didn't share their rationale about the payola perquisites, but he'd managed the minor miracle of staying relatively straight in one of the two or three most corruption-ridden shops in the country, without earning any of the pejorative nicknames like Mr. Clean or St. Eichord that would stick to you and haunt your career.
Vic Springer had been cordial in a cold kind of way, but Jack had a solid first impression of the man and he liked him. That was vital. At least that the ostensible cat in charge be somebody who wouldn't bury Eichord in bullshit. He thought Springer looked like a good, hard-nosed straight shooter. A good cop.
What Springer looked like was in fact a caricature of a hound dog. A plug-ugly version of Lyndon Johnson. A sad-eyed basset but photographed by Karsh. A woebegone hound who had one of those faces that wore a perpetual expression of dolorousness. Eichord would soon learn that this was his happy face. In normal repose his countenance registered abject misery. When he was upset, angry, or dejected, his face caved in like a wrecked building. But Eichord knew that faces are only masks.
Jack shook the necessary hands and left to seek appropriate lodging. On the minus side, the cop shop looked like it could be a problem. He'd put on his best PR hat and try to shake it out. The killings seemed so unrelated and, for want of a better word, random he hadn't even begun to comprehend it all. A tough case for Mr. Keen, and impossible for Mr. Eichord. Where the hell was the Falcon when you needed him?
Also on the minus side, he didn't remember a damn thing about the St. Louis of today. Where had Gaslight Square gone to when he wasn't looking? Where would he go to drink his single light beer as he sat at a friendly sidewalk cafe talking with amiable strangers? How would Mr. Crime Crusher find his way around town
? What was he doing here? Why me, Lord? he thought.
On the plus side .... he liked the arch.
Forewarned about the St. Louis apartment scene, he'd headed for a motel that advertised you could SLEEP CHEAP under their hospitable roof, and the room smelled like a chemical pine forest where the trees smoked, but the bed looked good. He didn't. He glanced at himself in the mirror as he was hanging up his clothing, trying to see what kind of canine he resembled, and he finally decided a street mongrel. The dark-eyed pound hound glared back in silent reproof.
It had been weeks since Spain had woken bathed in nightmare sweat. The killings in Texas and Florida and across the border had left him serene and calm. He'd been sleeping like a baby of late, sleeping the kind of sleep you get from hard work, good health, peace of mind, and an untroubled conscience. But this time something had been off-key. He'd worked a bit too hard. Gone to bed exhausted. Vulnerable.
He'd fallen asleep fully clothed, bone-weary, and for the first time in many nights a bad dream came and got him again. It was the worst one of all. It began in absolute black with him dreaming he was dreaming, listening to his own loud snores, then seeing something moving in the corner of the darkened bedroom and jerking awake in fear. Did he forget to throw the bolts he'd just installed on the doors? Had someone entered the house while he was sleeping?
A horrible, undefined presence fills him with fear. It moves again. Just a suggestion of an outline moving there in the deep blackness, and he almost screams at the eyes that blink open. Huge yellow eyes glowing brightly as a cat's eyes will appear to reflect light in darkness, but these are electric yellow, piercingly bright, a couple of feet apart. Whatever this thing is, it is huge.
In his heart he knows what has come to get him. This dark, millenarian force that sleeps the sleep of death. Spain's mind feeds him a word he does not know: chilead. He shivers. This evil thing he sees has chosen to wake up in the midst of Spain's dream. And although he cannot see in the darkness he knows its mighty razor claws are clutching a single, amaranthine fleur du mal. He can imagine its reptilian dragon skin, this ultraxerothermic thing that thrives on blast furnace heat, and he knows of the dread monster's power. And he is so afraid that before he can catch himself the scream escapes.
The monstrous thing roars to life in an explosion of wind rain light fiber optics rainbows oil slicks fire ice fog hurricane typhoon monsoon tornado tidal wave blizzard intense heat invisible cobwebs catching in the hair and eyelashes a sense of foreign substances being injected down through subdermal layers as the thing's feeders extend out like shoots of lightning stabbing him with surgical precision in his orifices like blinding catheters of death and ... He shudders with the first deft feeding touch that drains his lifeblood in a violent, spasmodic suck. The thing opens its reptile jaws and articulates, "Well, hello dere." And it laughs raucously as he feels the thing begin shooting the alien microorganisms back down through the catheters, filling him up with the foul scavengers' anal drippings taken from the bottom of the deepest trench of the blackest vomitorium of hell, fucking him with the devil's sperm scorching him as the thing forces it back down inside him.
The enormous thing moves closer and Spain can see that it is encased in a gelatinous membrane that houses its food and waste sacs. The reptile's skin is pale, dead-looking like a freshly powdered corpse, stretched tightly across a misshapen skull, but brightly colored, with unnatural highlights that suggest an opalescent mutation. Eyes are the color of pus afire.
The long silver tongue appears sanguine, as if a large, garlike fish had been dipped in coagulating blood, and it is forked, barbed, ridged, and extensile, still coated with a recent regurgitation.
Bright wet red on rubidium silver that inflames when the air hits it as the thing articulates, "Come on now, give us a big kiss," and roars again in a massive paroxysm of uncontrollable hilarity and vomits up his blood. Spain is drenched in a boiling hot shower of exudate, leukocytes, offal, bloody tissue, and feces. And he wakes up dreaming he is drowning in a Niagara of scalding filth hearing the ancient monster's laughter in the distance, muffled as if underwater as Spain dies hearing the thing's voice say faintly, "You kill me," as he is drained, burnt, shocked, drowned, suffocated, asphyxiated, exsanguint-ed, and frightened — to death.
And Spain dreams he dies, transfused through vascular nasties by Demogorgon's putrid, poisonous, scorching, deadly coital ejaculate, and boiled in killer fuck.
Eichord was no big whodunit sleuth. Not in his mind. No white knight or blue crime crusher. He saw himself as no better or worse than most of the co-workers. The attitude made for good vibes. So Jack would get along with even the worst and the stupidest and the most corrupt among them if the case demanded it. He was totally into getting The Job done. And he loved the action of Homicide.
MCTF, originally funded to handle unusual major crimes of violence, had been restructured shortly after the Doctor Demented thing, and Eichord found him-self playing a new role — that of a key agent with an elite special unit.
McTuff was more than just another tax-dollared, tunnel vision committee-run hand job. It was federally funded, to be sure, but there similarities ended.
When an agency, local or otherwise, plugged into MCTF it accessed a vast network offering some of the richest data product ever provided law enforcement. COMSEC at Ft. Meade, the counterterrorism think tanks here and in Europe, the Academy at Quantico, DEA, the military, you had it all a fingertip away.
You could cross-reference crime-scene reports on a possible serial killing in Mississippi or plumb the incredible resources of some of NCIC's best-kept secrets, all in the push-button miracle of high tech.
For the last few years the paralyzing rivalries that had torn through certain areas of law enforcement had begun to disintegrate. A new director had revamped the FBI to the point where it was now dealing with both the locals and the gents in Langley, and there was some actual sharing of important collars, as well as information and evidence. It was truly without precedent, codifying computerized group-think and launching the new, emergent criminologist, which boded ill for criminals. The new spirit of liaison was especially important in narcotics-related cases, but it also meant that certain types of homicides had a much better chance of being cleared.
McTuff produced crime-profile printouts that reflected an unbelievable degree of sophistication. It structured threat-assessment work-ups that had enormously beneficial capability on many levels. And best of all to police, it was user-friendly. Jack was a believer. He thought that the Task Force's greatest strength was its subtle, implicit reliance on the human being. It seemed to understand there was only one way to really find out what somebody else was thinking or what they were going to do — and to find that out, you had to use people. Other cops. Informants. This was the area where McTuff worked its most fertile and productive soil. It could build you a snitch machine.
Life is a series of trade-offs. The art of compromise. The understanding of quid pro quo. One hand washing another. And in the strange, murky, quirky world of law and the lawbreaker, justice demanded the oily, slippery lubricant of the deal to continue functioning. If you accepted this you would make the system work for you. If you didn't your life on The Job could be a nightmare.
The complexities of the maddening legal system itself could hamstring a law officer to the point of paralysis. The jurisdictional intricacies, the opaqueness of the codes, the double-think of the statutes, the sheer insanity of the procedures, rules, postulates, and disciplines, could nail you through your shield; leave you rigid, desk-bound, static, immobilized by the bone-crushing weight of the paperwork, skewered by the uncompromisingly doctrinaire methodology of the frustratingly inadequate system that had failed the society it promised to protect and serve.
MCTF had been devised, implemented, programmed, and calibrated by people who had worked their whole lives within the system and they had used their hard-won knowledge. The computer knew how to search for potential information keys, and it gave a
user the proper leverage with which to put a machine into motion. A lowly copper in Buchanan County-miles, histories, quantum leaps away from a powerful DA in Suffolk County, just as one example — could patch right into a heavyweight plea-bargain deal that would accomplish what only the best negotiators could pull off: make all the parties happy simultaneously. McTuff knew how to make a jam disappear, and crime is solved by snitches, never doubt it. It was the ultimate snitch machine.
The Task Force had no centuries-old tradition of policework as a heritage. Fathered by high tech, its mother of invention had been the bestial serial murders that had seemed to spring out of the poisonous karma of the 60s, like some mutation from Agent Orange. Zodiac, Manson, Gacey, a blood-soaked trail of bodies sweeping across the country, leaving a wake of grisly legend.
The Task Force, obviously, was a child of the times. So Jack Eichord, people-oriented copper, had become Jack Eichord, task-oriented organization man. These were not your run-of-the-mill bad guys, these serial kills. They were a new breed of evil mutant and they had to be found and stopped — at any cost.
It was to McTuff that Eichord turned first, with a fat dossier full of fact and conjecture and a dozen thankless tasks that could not be accomplished by computers and think tanks alone. PEOPLE would have to go interrogate all those TWA flight attendants and stewardii and gift-shop employees. Somebody had to ask all those questions and hear all those answers, and as always — in the end — it all came down to shoe leather.
And Big Mac failed him this time. SEE NO EVIL had, for all intents and purposes, vanished.
The one called Spain sat perusing his St. Louis dossier, now more of a scrapbook actually, and his gaze fell upon a small two-column clipping razored out of a recent Post-Dispatch. Its headlines read MISSOURI APPEALS COURT REVERSES CONVICTION, and he saw the name Andrew Dudzik and something clicked in place in his mind. He remembered the connection now and he scanned the article again.