by Rex Miller
And some big guard is coming up to the window and the kid rolls it down and the guy is saying something about the night deposit being temporarily closed and all the old man can see is a cap and a badge of some kind and there's the loud bang and Dick is slumping over my God something shot him OH GOD DON'T NOOOOOOOO THE EXPLOSION AND BLINDING FIRE AND THE SMACK OF THE TINY LEAD NEEDLE THE BULLET EMBEDDING ITSELF IN HIS NECK AND OH MY GOD WHY ARE YOU KILLING US LIKE THIS? And the guard leans in and shoots the man on the passenger side again but still it doesn't kill him. As he shoots the car starts moving as Dick Kresse/Richard Cross slides down and to his right and into the man beside him and his foot is off the brake and the car's idling engine is tuned up so high that it surges forward slightly as the huge man tries to wrench the door open but it is locked and the car keeps going until it hits a concrete abutment and it stops and the man has charged after it on strong, tree-trunk legs and he smashes the window and pulls the driver out of the way, taking the checks and cash in the zippered envelope between them, pocketing the checks, which he'll destroy later. He will not try to dispose of these bodies, and he senses the older man is still alive and he puts the long-barreled .22 to the ear of the one on the passenger side and fires another round killing him.
Chaingang takes the two wallets containing, respectively, $68 and $170, and then he finds two hundreds tucked inside a “hidden” compartment in the wallet with the $68 in it, and he doesn't stop to count it all but in less than three minutes he's made about $6,300 and change. More than satisfactory, he thinks, quickly obliterating the prints on the envelope and door handle, and moving toward the car parked nearby, wiping off the empty billfolds and pitching them in the street as he walks. He will not endanger himself further here but soon he must satisfy his hunger for bloody essence of human. He craves a fresh heart.
Even the girl's would do, he thinks, letting himself toy with the idea in his twisted mind as he drives back to her, although he knows he needs her if only for the time being. Soon, however, he will slice open this albatross.
BUCKHEAD SPRINGS
Eichord, who has not had one of THOSE nightmares—for over a year, comes floating up to the surface of a screaming hell, dreaming the word “INTEGUMENT,” something that covers or encloses, an enveloping layer of skin, a membrane or husk. He is unable to break through to the air, but finally comes up fighting, lungs bursting, and it is one of the worst of the screaming dreams. It's a nightmare of tortured, mad, blue-eyed twins from the Mengele clinic, a fearsome thing borne of his most redoubtable adversaries. Searching for parallels in the demonology of classical antiquity, he finds a face that resembles a dead assassin in his dream of the necropolis, and he comes awake screaming in fear. No! HEARING a shrill, frightened scream, the agony of his amanuensis, and he comes out of the dream fighting for the surface hearing Donna Scannapieco fighting her assailant.
He breaks through the integument woven across his old boozer's face to find himself facedown on his own bed and safe, but Donna is screaming. He is wide awake, dazed, on his feet with his revolver in his hand. Stubbing his toe against something as he runs through the house toward the back door.
“JACK! JACK!” Donna's screams fill his head as he crashes through the door nearly taking it from its hinges. Donna has the kitten now and he sees that she is safe and the cat is hurt my God it was just the kitten not Donna oh Jesus not Donna oh God his heart is thumping pounding threatening to burst through his chest and then he sees the black cat the mean fucking little yellow-eyed tough-guy tomcat and he draws down on it drawing down on all the Cabreys and Mansons and Zodiacs and Williamses and Houtchesons and Gaceys and fucking Spanhowers and sniping, torturing backshooting crazies and squeezes through sleep-encrusted eyes.
BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM! The fucking thing sounds like an H-bomb going off in his back yard and of course Christ he's asleep and the little cat is fifty feet away and moving and Eichord can't hit shit with a handgun and never could and all the missed shots that have cost him, perhaps even the ones he doesn't know about yet, all those fantasies from a thousand Johnny Mack Brown and Durango and Wild Bill Elliott westerns in the Uptown and all those movies and TV show cowboys and cops and perfect, perfectly wonderful sharpshooting mothers come back to kick his ass as he misses. Nothing but a fucking yellow-eyed bully of a tomcat. Still, the noise scares the poor kitten and it scratches Donna, who screams again and runs into the house with the little cat. Tuffkins has a mangled ear, and Eichord is filled with a blue-eyed, dadgummed Mengele clinic rage the likes of which has not possessed him since the old hard-drinking days of alcoholic, mindless frustration and self-flagellation. He stomps in through the house and out into the garage, where he pops the cartridges and the spent shell casing out of his service revolver. For whatever combination of reasons—out of control, fucked over and fucked up by the thousand and one inequities and irritations and shit he's had to swallow—he cranks that vise handle down tight, cranking down on case-hardened steel, twisting down on good ole Mr. Smith and Mr. Wesson, tightening down on his weapon. Shit—he can't believe he's doing it even as he twists the vise—he's just so fucking mad! If he could only laugh, stop for a second, count to ten. But he's out of goddamn maniacal, shit, fucking CONTROL. He just can't take any more and there are limits. But maybe part of his brain is still asleep still fighting his way through the husk or whatever it was, as he puts it all into the first shot, with the four-pound mini-sledgehammer. Jack puts all his weight, his shoulders, his upper-body strength his biceps, his triceps, forceps, foreplay, foreskin—FUCK FUCK FUCKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK!
He's pounding that barrel, that sight, that trigger guard, that hammer, slamming down on all the bullshit and the bad guys and the B-movies and the bad jokes and the bad shots and the people who would hurt sweet ladies and innocent kittens and oh fuck do you want a list of them—DONT YOU FUCKING KNOW WHO THOSE SONS OF BITCHES ARE? ARE YOU A FUCKING IDIOT—? CAN'T YOU DO SOMETHING ABOUT THEM? CANT YOU STOP THEM SOMEHOW YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO BE SOME HOT FUCKING SHIT GENIUS THEN PROVE IT STOP THEM FUCKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK SHIT PISS DAMN IT TO HELL pounding as hard and as fast as he can and then falling apart laughing just roaring to think he was so nuts for a minute that he has taken a four-pound hammer, this is Mr. Control—now—Jack Eichord for Chrissakes we're talking about here, and he's turned his service revolver, a PERFECTLY good weapon that he actually liked and trusted, and he just can't believe it he's rendered it into a full month's take-home worth of metal garbage. Just brilliant. And he gets up, lays the hammer down, leaves the semi-unrecognizable Magnum in the vise, and goes in to see how his wife and their cat are doing. Thinking as he does so that they will almost surely never film the Jack Eichord Story now. Mr. Eastwood would probably balk at starring in anything titled Magnum Farce, particularly when he would have to play a character called Stupid Harry. It just doesn't have that same ring to it. Oh, well. He walks in and Donna is standing there. Looking at him as if to say. Okay, what OTHER weird tricks can you do?
He makes that total body gesture that begins with the wrinkles in the forehead and goes down through the hands that says, “I know. I'm sorry. What can I say?"
And turns and goes back to the bedroom and goes back and gets his oldest 12-gauge down and carries it back through the house, saying to Donna on the way out into the garage, “Don't worry. I'm not going to do anything else weird,” but he goes out into the garage and does something very weird indeed. He pounds his workbench vise open, drops the remains of his revolver in a box to be buried with full honors later, and wrapping an old oily towel around the gun, he puts IT in the vise, takes a hacksaw, and begins sawing the barrel off. Gunsmithing for the terminally insane.
NASHVILLE
“Uh, Daniel,” the girl said in her little soft voice, and he glanced over at her quickly, then back at the busy traffic on Interstate 24, “I'm sick. Could we stop pretty soon?"
He just grunted and nodded and said, in his basso profundo rumble, “Yeah.” Within ten minutes he was reg
istering them into a decent motel. She lay flat on her back, breathing like a beached whale, while he carried in such luggage as they possessed by now, which included a duffel bag most people couldn't even lift off the floor much less carry.
“I hurt,” she told him when he'd come in and closed the door. Her incessant stream of birdlike chatter had slowed to a trickle and then dried up completely during his most recent southeastern journey.
“Spread your legs,” he said.
“I don't feel like doing it,” she said, misunderstanding his intentions.
“SPREAD ‘EM.” She spread her legs and he examined her. Dr. Bunkowski noticed a small “blob of blood” which was the result of the displacement of a mucus plug from the uterine cervix. He told her, “You're all right.” She smiled and rolled over on her side as best she could, propped on a mound of motel pillows, and immediately fell asleep.
He set his mental clock for six hours’ sleep and was snoring peacefully within sixty seconds.
“Wake up,” he told her. He had slept for five hours and fifty-four minutes. He went into the bathroom and when he came out she was still lying there unmoving.
“What's the matter?” he asked.
“I think it's getting to that time."
“You hurting?"
“Not exactly.” She was feeling contractions of her uterus. Daniel had her walk around a little. It didn't make any difference. He carried the desk chair into the bathroom, ran hot water into the bathtub, and had Sissy sit in the chair with her feet in the hot water.
“You feeling good enough to travel?” he asked after a few minutes.
“Sure” she said, rather unconvincingly. “I guess so."
They got back in the car, heading in the direction of Chattanooga, the next stop on the route that made a slow, curving arrow pointed at the heart of one Jack Eichord.
HUBBARD CITY
“Yes, sir,” the cop was saying to him, “that's really all we can give you at this point.” At least he hadn't been one of those people who would genuflect, then take it out on Eichord that he'd been made into a star; or an autograph hound; or somebody who wanted to know what Dr. Demented was really like. This was a dude trying to do his job, and for that Jack was grateful.
“Okay. Appreciate your help. I'm gonna get going."
“Okay. Good luck with it."
“Thanks.” He shook hands with the local guys and went outside where the chopper was waiting for him. That was the thing about the task force, there was no scrimping. They went first-class. They got you in “yesterday” and sliced down through all the layers of red tape like a hot knife into the lard of bureaucratic paperwork. They got things done.
Eichord had been sitting at his desk in Buckhead Station one minute and was literally in a vehicle heading for the airport the next, summoned with an emergency forthwith by the Major Crimes Task Force. MacTuff, as the acronym was pronounced, wanted him in Stobaugh County, Illinois, and yesterday. And when they reached out for you like that, you just relaxed and went with it.
It seemed to take longer to get to the crime scene than it had to fly in from Buckhead. He choppered from Hubbard City, which was in southern Stobaugh County, down to an impromptu landing zone at a place called Bayou Landing, where he was met by a pair of feds, one of whom he already knew.
“Hi, Tom,” he said as they shook hands quickly, shielding their faces as the helicopter lifted in the invariably threatening windstorm.
“Jack. Come on,” Tom said loudly over the noise, and they ran for the waiting car.
“Jack, this is Walter Belcher,” he said. “Jack Eichord.” Tom D'Amico and Jack had worked together on a couple of things in the past, if only nominally. D'Amico was a competent, career-type federal agent. Eichord didn't know him well, nor did he feel like there was a lot to know. Just somebody he'd seen around on task-force assignments.
“Where do you want to start?” he asked Eichord as soon as the vehicle was moving.
“I'd like to see the bridge, then go look at the bodies. You still getting corpses out of there?"
“Negative. I think we may have ‘em all. Fourteen bodies. That includes the trucker."
“How'd the other pictures turn out?"
“Okay, considering.” The first batch of stuff they'd taken underwater had been ruined in developing. “Here's some of the new ones.” He reached back across the front seat and handed Eichord a thick manila envelope. There was a smaller white envelope inside that, and Jack looked at the shots.
“Christ,” he said softly. You really couldn't see much in the shots. A couple of the underwater shots showed the cars pretty clearly, and one in particular with a corpse's face in a window would make for some interesting new nightmares for everybody who looked at it.
The shots of the cars pulled out of the water were so bizarre and terrifying that they almost had a fake look about them, as if a Hollywood schlock producer had decided to film Demolition Derby of the Undead and this was the big chase scene, featuring rust buckets full of cadavers in various states of bloated decomposition. He'd seen enough for the time being and handed the envelope back to D'Amico.
“We'll have big blowups by tomorrow. Better resolution and whatnot. The diagrams are here"—he handed Eichord a thick dossier—"with everything we've got so far. Which isn't much."
“Jack,” the other agent said, “five of them were locals, did you notice?"
“Any theories on that, Walter?” he asked the man sitting beside him.
“Nah.” He shook his head. “We may have an ID on this one.” Belcher leaned over and pointed at one of the Jane Doe descriptions. “We're waiting to get the word on this one right now, but barring a surprise, I think this will be Rosa Lotti. Housewife married to a sheet-metal worker in Varney. Been missing a couple weeks. We know this is a farmer, name of Perce F. Shaunessy. Farms some ground not too far from where these two lived. Hora and his common-law wife. They haven't been in the water too long from the looks of ‘em."
“The one named Lee Moore is a friend of Shaunessy's,” Tom D'Amico said. “There's no connection between the Horas and Moore and Shaunessy other than geography, so far as we know. Shaunessy is believed to have known who Hora was. He's the one that wholesaled to nurseries, landscapers, gardeners, and so forth. Moore worked in some blue-collar job. It's there. I forget."
“A karate instructor?” Eichord read. “Sophomore in high school? Jeezus, these people look like they gotta be random kills."
“It really looks that way,” Belcher said.
“Couldn't be some kinda drug thing?” No comment. “You know—a mob thing maybe. They want to do a copycat number. Make it look like the Chicago killings."
“I don't much think so. Shit, the dopers around here all grow their own out in the back yard. There hasn't been much. They busted a pretty good-sized operation up in Centerburg a few months ago. But God, nothing like, you know, these mutilations and so on."
“Cubans, maybe? One of the new Latin gangs? Vengeance killings?” The shrugs were almost audible.
“Well, surely do have a bunch of John Does here. Could be anything. Any damn thing at all."
One phrase kept leaping out at him off the page, and it made him feel sick and he stopped reading and leaned back in the seat and said. “Tom. If you don't mind. Run it down for me again, wouldja? Right from the point the sheriff gets into it?"
“Last night,” D'Amico said, turning in the front seat beside the uniformed driver, “Sheriff Bob Andersen gets a call about this tractor trailer going off the Iron Bridge—that's what they used to call the bridge, it's in the folder as the Wooden Bridge, same difference. Anyway, driver was looped and thought he was taking a shortcut and goes right off this old bridge. I mean, you'd have to be totally out of it not to see there wasn't anything there, but if you were tired, and drunk, and it was the darkest night of the year ... Anyway he didn't see the barricades and just blasted through the steel cable and chains and whatnot and—wham!—sixty feet straight down into the muddy wat
er. Couple people came along, God knows what they were doing out here at three a.m.—making out I suppose. They see the truck in the water down there, the mess all over where it crashed through, they call for an ambulance, the ambulance guys call the sheriff."
“Eula Minery and Dub Ziegenheimer?” Eichord asked. “These the two that noticed the truck."
“Right."
“No satisfactory explanation as to what they were doing on a dark road at three in the morning. Looking down into a swampy old creek sixty feet below. They got priors or anything?"
“Nah."
“Something's funny about that. I don't know. Anyway, so the sheriff gets a call."
“Right. He gets outta bed and comes out. Gets the state rods and whatnot. They call us. The guys who did the diving with lights to try to see if there might have been another body thrown out in the impact, they see a car with three corpses in it and assumed that this was like—you know, an ACCIDENT—and then they go back down and find another car. And another. All old junkers. It was totally weird."
“I imagine.” A note on another page caught his eye and he said, “This one corpse marked as John Doe #2. Badly decomposed. Mutilated body. Heart missing. Estimated to be in the water six to eight weeks. What the hell is going on here?"
