by Rex Miller
Prints. Powder—for the shooting team. Lint on the rounds. Nothing worse than rounds in a magazine somebody has wiped off. Angle of the dangle to match the heat of the meat. All by the numbers now. A weapon that's gonna look like it was fired once, and by the decedent, lead in the head, spent brass by her ass. Double-check—you got the second round in the box, the casing in the sack. So far so good.
There is no sense of being executioner or any of that superior, lofty, silly shit. No sense of right or wrong. We can sit down and worry later if this has bought us a ticket into hell, right? There's time or there isn't—so go to it. Eichord starts in the master bedroom and takes his time, working his way back downstairs to Nicki. She'll wait for him now. Yes, sir.
The only time problem is the timing problem. And that's no problem at all. Everything is under control. The arrest warrant gets served. The search warrant covers the entry. He'll be right there with the shooting team. What's not to love about it? Hell, there's a whole fucking WORLD not to love about this cluster fuck. But not now. Now is for looking. Prying into Mr. Spoda's dark world. Looking for icepicks and blood trails and creepy-crawlies.
The other box, in with the ballistics box in the sack, comes out, penetration of the cabinet again. Shit, I oughta get a key made, he thinks. He takes a better, moh puhfeck casting, brudder. This baby has to be el perfecto.
Finally, forty minutes later, he has run the whole nine yards. It's either done or it ain't. He opens his notebook and removes the paper. It appears to be a mimeographed or poorly photocopied “Miranda Versus” form. Two thick rubber bands hold it in place. But the Miranda ends under the second rubber band. He carefully unfolds what Nicki Dodd has signed and reads her brief suicide note. So-so.
Back at the typewriter, being extremely careful, hitting the keys slowly, one at a time, he types an identical note, leaving the message on the typewriter. He has debated putting a couple of neat, clear prints on the keys, but he has used an object that probably won't smear everything. Be funny if Schumway's prints would be clear and we can make HIM a suspect. Eichord smiles, but this isn't him smiling. Not now.
This is some other cat. Some rogue cop who is capable of taking the law into his own hands. This is a smiling murderer, baby. And fuck THAT, too. Sometimes the system fails.
Funny. He'd had an image register when they moved from the door. The rolling swagger so incongruous in a good-looking woman's walk. A tight end in drag. That Vegas hooker look, that's what she reminded him of. A Vegas casino hooker.
Think electric chair. Jack the Ripper Eichord, one-man firing squad. Jesus in heaven! At that second he felt as mad Saucy Jack must have felt, knowing your single contribution had been that of the razor's red kiss.
Buckhead Springs
Donna was talking about some pamphlets she wanted Jack to read about how to discipline a two-year-old, and he was not trying to tune her out, it was just that he couldn't shake the images from the day. Going back to the house with the evidence guys and the M.E. and the shooting team from Buckhead North had been as bad or worse than the awful scene this morning. Every step, every word of dialogue, was a land mine.
Somehow he'd gotten through it, but he couldn't shrug it all off. He kept worrying it like a cat with an addled mouse, shaking it, letting go for a moment, then jumping on it again. All things being equal, it fell together well. The surveillance team last night hadn't been yanked into thin air, they'd planted ‘em over at the Starlight Motor Inn, watching Mrs. Lauder. Then, with a dozen people still at the crime scene, working the house, Alan Schumway picked up for questioning, a totally bizarre thing happened.
The medical examiner had phoned the cop shop, who radioed the people on the scene. Eichord was told by one of the guys from North that the decedent was a man. He couldn't fucking believe it. Nobody could. It was going to cut their possible murder one suspect a hell of a lot of slack. Suddenly Nicki/Nicholas had begun to look like a sure-enough suicide. He/ she popped a cap into her head, with a note that said, “I'm sorry. I just can't take it anymore.” Signed, sealed, and delivered. A fucking transvestite blew his/ her brains out all over the living-room shag.
“She said they had a residual, no? I can't read my own notes, residential treatment center. And the funny thing was that a lot of these girls that come in there, you know, as battered wives, and it's incredible, a lot of them end up battering their own kids because—"
“Hey, Eichord,” fat Dana with the all-time grossest joke of the day.
“What?"
“You know why Alan and Nicki lived together?"
“Why?"
“Well, he couldn't walk, man. So he had to get a TV for his bedroom.” Screaming laughter. Fucking peabrain.
“—in the emergency foster home. So I told her about Jonathan and she said that it was perfectly natural for—"
What happens when he gets a card in the mail from Diane Taluvera. “Gee—sorry I didn't get back to you, but Bonnie said you were trying to get in touch...” Christ. A million things could collapse on him. He fought to lock in on what his wife was saying to him. She was looking at him intently so he nodded sagely.
“On the other hand,” he said, trying to look like a normal human being and not a fucking murdering FREAK, “you know the old saying."
“What's that?"
“Spare the rod and spoil the child."
9 Days Later
It was Sunday and Donna had taken Jonathan to church with her. She tried to get Jack to go and he begged off. Work.
“It's Sunday, honey,” she said.
“I know."
“Do you have to work on Sunday?"
“No choice, Donna. Sorry,” he lied.
“We'll miss you. Won't we, my big boy?” He said nothing, dressed in his finery. Clean. “Won't we miss Daddy?"
“No,” the boy said loudly.
“There you are,” Eichord said.
“NO."
“Say YES. Jonathan. Say YES. Can you say YES?"
"NO!"
“Please?"
“No,” the child cooed pleasantly.
“Okay.” Donna turned to Jack. “Come with us?"
“Can't do it, babe.” He was afraid that everything showed in his voice. He had the doll house and the three dolls waiting for them for after church. He'd had them for days, but couldn't bring himself to do it. He couldn't wait any longer. They had to start trying to pull the little boy out of whatever darkness had hold of him.
Church had been a disaster for Donna. Jonathan had misbehaved, she told him, and she'd finally been forced to take him to the cry room, off the nursery, where a woman had entertained him until the services were over and Donna could reclaim him.
“Were you a bad boy in church?” Jack asked.
"NO! NO! NO! NO!" Screaming at the top of his voice.
After he'd had some time to calm down, the three of them had a light lunch, and then Jack and Donna sat down on the floor with Jonathan and played dolls. This is Mommy and Daddy. They love each other very much. God gave them a little son. This is Jonathan. They loved Jonathan with all their hearts. They lived together in a house by the side of the road. And so on...
About five-forty-five Donna walked in front of the TV set in the family room where Jack sat vegetating in front of a football game. She was sobbing.
“What is it, angel?” He leaned forward, starting to stand up, and froze at the look of horror on her face as she showed him what she had in her hands.
“He-he brought them to me.” It was the Mommy and Daddy dolls. They were headless. Hey, things take time. No big deal. He's just a little boy.
He waited until about eight that night, and on the pretense of going out to pick up a magazine, he left the house and called Doug Geary long-distance from a payphone. He took him through the recent chain of events.
Dr. Geary said, “Jack, my friend, isn't it possible you've blown these things out of proportion? Two-year-olds don't take photographs out of picture frames. Their hand-to-eye coordination would
n't allow it. Don't you think you may be reading into the—"
“Doc, it wasn't like that. He pulled that picture down and the glass broke. It never did fit in the frame right anyway, and when it hit the floor, the picture fell out. But he reached a little hand into that pile of glass and got the photograph. I saw him tear it. I saw his eyes."
“He'll grow out of it. Jack. They all do."
“He tore the HEADS off the dolls that represented us. He HATES us."
“Listen, it's perfectly natural.” He spent ten more minutes doing his best to reassure Jack Eichord that two-year-old Jonathan was going to be all right. It would work out. The kid wasn't a latent psycopath, after all. Everything would work out.
Finally Jack rang off with self-deprecating apologies, some laughter, and profuse thanks. But he wasn't smiling when the line went dead. Inside him there was something worse than any horror he'd ever known. A gnawing thing that he was afraid was chewing out a permanent place in his guts. He had lived to see one of his worst fears realized: finding himself having to constantly fight his own thought processes, the one horror you can never escape. Thought cancer.
Driving back home under the painful weight of it, he could understand that he was working overtime to throw off verboten thoughts, fighting to shake loose of them like someone throwing off piles of extra covers on a hot summer night, only to awake the next morning drenched in sweat and covered in the same blankets.
And in the morning Eichord woke up petrified with the fearful leftover vision from his night dreams: the official form with the space marked accident—suicide-homicide. The one he'd dreamed was marked cause of death—deferred.
16 Days Later
One thing about fighting—you could make up. They were on the bed.
“You're a good chick,” he told her, sitting beside her and patting her leg, “you know that?"
The kid was asleep, temporarily forgotten.
“Aww. How sweet.” She took his big hand and kissed the hairy, thick fingers and the large knuckles.
“That's me."
“You sure have been down in the dumps lately."
“Nawww. Not really."
“Urn hmmm."
“Nah. Just moody—I dunno. Quiet, I guess."
“I know you too well, sweetie. You'll eventually tell me what's buggin’ you. When you get good and ready."
“Don't worry about me. I'm cool."
“I guess it's second nature to worry about you,” she said, “considering the nature of your job. I'll probably always worry about you. But I'm not worried now. You just seem preoccupied. Kind of blue or bugged or something. I don't have anything to worry about, do I?"
“Nope.” He leaned over and kissed her softly.
“You haven't been foolhardy, have you. Officer? Haven't done something else real heroic, have you? Don't scare me now."
“Never fear, babe. Or, as Stan Laurel used to say, I'm no fool. Hardy."
“I see."
“Sounds like a Mel Brooks line."
“Yeah, but Mel Brooks can't do this,” she said, and she pulled him down to her and started doing a truly miraculous thing to his mouth and his eyes and his ears and his face, doing something with her tongue that felt so hot, and the silk robe was coming open and he saw what she was wearing under it.
A flimsy little thing he'd seen in one of the lingerie catalogs she'd heard him remark about. Oh, my sakes alive. Heavens to Betsy. Yes. He touched her and she pulled back a little and let him look at those perfectly shaped expialadocious breasts of hers, which were threatening to rip through the wispy top. Oh, yeah. And he was on top of her in all her titillating erect-nippled tongue-salivating schlong-hardening gorgeous get-inside-of-me-and-do-it perfection.
Afterward Donna wouldn't leave him alone. She started playing with him. Teasing him very gently with her hand, barely touching him with her fingers. Letting her fingertips flutter over him intimately, and there was some response and she said, in her sexiest whisper, “I want more,” and he told her, “You expect a lot of a dead man,” but she knew how to inflame him and he rose to the occasion.
He was very relaxed, nude under a sheet listening to Donna shower, and two words forced their way in before he could slam his brain shut and block them out. Two ugly, bloodred words that had no business here on this nice day, intruding on their playtime, forcing their way into his bedroom:
E N T R A N C E W O U N D
is what he saw with his mind's eye. Then, instantly visualizing his mental checklist, which he reconstructed anew each time a memory assailed his waking thoughts.
E N T R A N C E W O U N D / E X I T
L A T E N T P R I N T S
B A L L I S T I C S
H A I R & F I B E R S
E V I D E N C E / D O C U M E N T S
M O T I V E
and on down through the two dozen awful wet and slippery places where a man could step and suddenly his feet were out from under him and he was flying through the air and heading for the open window and it was such a long fall to the bottom...
How many times would he have to run through that horror of a day? Sit in that car again watching Scum-wad leave. Knock at that big, ornate door and hear the thing inside screech. Muscle in and get the name on the suicide note folded under a fake Miranda. Obtain a print on the bullet, and later the rounds for the magazine. Load that first one surreptitiously. Get the angle just so. Pressure on the trigger. Note the position of the brass. Check for blood and gore on the clothing. The ballistics box is in the sack with the other stuff. Put the clip back in, force the skinny fingers around the drop-gun, push it into the hole in the box and fire. Spent brass in the sack. Prints on the note. Note nearby. Type the note again and the paper goes in the sack. Did he remember to put some of the pocket lint on the shells that went in the magazine? Did he remember not to forget to remember what it was he wasn't supposed to forget?
Witnesses. Time disparities. Surveillance logs. Cutouts. Warrant timing. What a fucking land mine this was becoming inside his head.
On the other hand, it had been more than three weeks since the last Iceman murder, assuming Diane Taluvera had been a victim. Each day he nagged the C.A.'s office about Schumway, just to keep his hand in.
“Penny for your thoughts?” Donna came in, wrapping a towel around her head, another bath towel bulging with woman.
“You'd lose money,” he said. Oh, I was just thinking about a transvestite I shot dead a couple of weeks ago.
Squinting his eyes, he saw the open bedroom door as the balcony of the lonely Vegas hotel room, and there in the imagined darkness he could imagine that the thrum of the house was the noisy air-conditioning, and the sounds of the outdoors and the screaming from the patio were the constant noise level that is Lost Wages after dark. Nicki, the man, had lived there with Arthur Spoda as lovers of a kind. A pair of killers. Both crippled in their own way. And he flashed on the white high heels and forlorn phone directory on a rooftop far below.
Some woman had once told him she had, as one of her duties for a Nevada hotel, the job of removing all the church listings from the directory's Yellow Pages. Presumably if you were in the house of worship of your preference, you couldn't be in the casino spending. Spoda/Schumway and his mutation of a lover would have been right at home there. Drawing power from the sickness that would cling to them like smoke.
Before he could block it he saw the words DREW POWER FROM materialize on the material from Arkansas, and the details from the Journal of Retribution homicides coursed through him in a shivery gush of blood. His own words still haunted him, and in that heartbeat of horrified weltanschauung he saw his own description of the maniac in South Blytheville.
“—other New Mexico aliases included J. Baptiste, The Baptist, a/k/a Snakebite. He believed that he drew power from consuming the breasts, penises, and testes of his victims, especially of children. Part of the rituals involved the ingestion of eyeballs, excrement, and—"
Penny for your thoughts. I dream of ent
rance wounds and torn babies, and I wonder if this thing I have done has made me one of THEM. Have I drawn too much power?
27 DAYS LATER...Mount Olive
“Jinx, I never saw such a fucking rat's nest,” the whore with the crooked teeth said, smiling. “Find it for me,” she whined.
“Will you give me a goddamn break for five fucking seconds?” the other whore said, her hand over the phone mouthpiece. “Look for it yourself, you're in such a hurry."
“Eyeglasses case, wallet, pen, notebook, lipstick, knife, Jesus Aitch! Hair spray, compact, Esgic, deodorant tampons for a sweet-smelling pussy, powder blush, makeup bag, more lipstick, what a fuckin’ RAT'S NEST.” The whore named Jinx slammed the door—that is, she reached for the handle to slam the door but there wasn't any handle because there wasn't any door.
“This is Jinx.” She smiled into the phone. “Hidee. Any calls?” She waited. “Okay.” She said over her shoulder, “Brandi! Bring me my purse. Come on. Hurry.” The whore with the crooked fangs got up on her high-heeled boots and clacked over with the outstretched purse. The woman on the phone rummaged for her datebook. “Did you take my pen ou—"
She saw the pen. “Oh.” She handed the purse back. “Go ahead,” she said, speaking into the phone.
“Breath mints, Trojans, coin purse, rain scarf, hand lotion, gum, keys, a fucking rat's nest in here, I tell you. Aspirin, Kleenex, FINALLY the fucking Tums.” She popped a couple and removed something else from the depths of the purse with a smile.
When the whore named Jinx came back over to the table, she said, “Hidee, Heidie, any calls?” She stuck the beat-up joint in her mouth and posed.
“You dumb bitch, get that outta your mouth.” They both laughed. “You crazy fool."