Slice

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 water. 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?"

“Nothing good."

“That's for sure."

“Jeezus.” He read the composite sheet of recent missing persons in southern Stobaugh County.

Heather Annenberg. Daughter of a podiatrist. Probable runaway.

Mary Anne Brimer. A married dietician.

John Davis. Another truck driver.

Ernest Jones. A cook. Another Jones. A Johnson.

Bill Judd. A computer programmer.

Jesse Keys. A carpenter and jack-of-all-trades.

Rosa Lotti. Housewife. A kid named Lingle. Thirteen.

Royce Maxwell. Unemployed.

Melba Murphy. College freshman.

Nuyen. Obergoenner, Odum, Olivera, Pyland, Reeves, Robinson, Rothstein, Rudert, Schmitz, Shanda, two Smiths, Sneathern, Stewart, Tewls, Timmons, Wade, Weiss. Which one of you is the face in the window?

Is it you, Royce Odum, twenty-seven, on your way home from representing the Monroe Implement Bowling League in a regional tournament, driving home to tiny Texas Corners after a great 259 game, never reaching your destination, your car found locked and empty in a field? Is it your face plastered there in the window of the rusting, wheelless car—a bloated freaked-out concentration camp photo to frighten your survivors, that look of horror caught on what was once your face in midscream? Is this your skull face, Royce? Talk, ole buddy, and tell me. Whodunit?

But Royce Odum is not talking now. Perhaps later. Later tonight when Eichord has spent a tiring and brutalizing day with the hideous cadavers and the frightening death-camp scenes, and he's back in his bed in the Hubbard City Motel; perhaps he'll be ready for a chat. Maybe while dreaming of Sugar Lake, Jack will spit into a visor and pull his mask on and dive down for a look-see, Royce. Down in the cold, muddy waters of dark Sugar Lake.

Perhaps tonight Jack will swim along through his own bubbles as he circles through the frigid underwater shadows of his childhood friends Whortley Williams and Cabrey Brown, his unforgettable pals of long ago, the bully boys who terrorized him so. And maybe he'll find them, each wearing a twisted chain around their elongated necks, each bloated, rotten body chained to the other and then wired to the roots of a mysterious dream tree, a leftover from the Houtcheson case. And then he'll swim by Royce's car and he'll be ready to say hello—speak to him then from that screaming skullhead and tell him all about it.

And seeing the imaginary and the real murder victims will somehow jar loose the old memory of a phrase—"salt walter taffy"—a combination of a cop's first name, the label of a waxy paper-covered piece of candy he once saw that he misread for salt water cadavers, a particularly gruesome pictorial chapter of a police forensics book, and God knows what childhood nightmare.

Will you speak to him then, Royce Odum? Telling Jack of the final minutes and seconds of your life, and of the monster of a man who took you down with muscles of steel and a neck, chest, leg, forearm, hip, gluteus max, pectorals triceps belly hardened by the cruelest regimen of bench presses, deep knee-bends, power squats, sit-ups, arms curls with stacks of landscape timbers, a thousand then ten thousand reps with the weighted whipsickle through impenetrable vetch, his cumbrous bulk and weight sweating, hardening, melting away, the fat dripping off, the steel tendons and muscles preparing to take you to the edge as you ascend the mountaintop funicular and your car breaks loose from the cables and you plummet down out of the sky toward an unyielding death that waits to flatten you—a final, bloody scream trapped in your throat.

And the dream will be very real and in the morning Jack Eichord will not awaken with a hangover as he has done on so many hundreds of shaking, booze-battered mornings in memory. He will awaken with the taste of taffy and the lingering, distinctive smell of a neoprene wet suit, and the thought of Royce's face in the window to chill him to the core. In his heart he will be afraid yet as he comes awake he will not know why.

“I think we may have ‘em all,” the guy told him. “Fourteen bodies,” and the number 14 stayed in his mind but he couldn't remember why or where or what. He remembered what it was when he got dressed the next morning, picking up the small fourteen-inch cardboard box that he carried everywhere now, the box that was only fourteen inches long, EXACTLY fourteen inches, but it felt like it weighed fourteen pounds. The box he carried the thing he'd made in—that day of his other recent nightmare, when he'd woken up after the blue-eyed Mengele clinic twins and the screaming voice that proved not to be a dream at all—the thing he'd made with his own wittle hacksaw.

One could no longer see the part that said it was “Made in New Haven, Conn., USA.” It no longer carried the maker's marks or the proud “Winchester Proof Steel.” All that was left said “L1653799,” and the thing was good for only one purpose. Up close, he could point this at four guys all at the same time, and this baby would quell a fucking mutiny. Because anybody could see that this thing Eichord carried in the box was ready to kick some serious ass. Eichord had grown weary of missing what he shot at. He didn't know how weary.

Jack Eichord had that feeling you get when the long double lane of cars is rolling through the tunnel under the river, the traffic bumper to bumper, everybody tailgating, everybody in a hurry, and suddenly somebody way up ahead slams on the brakes for whatever reason and all these vehicles screech to a stop. And you wait. And you know the cars will all start moving pretty soon the way they always do. And a few assholes start honking. Then you turn off the engine and kill your lights and just sit there. Waiting. Wondering what's happened up ahead in the darkness. Realizing for the first time there's a RIVER over your head on the other side of all the concrete and steel. Knowing that there's trouble up ahead. And with each minute that passes, the odds grow greater that the trouble is serious. And you can't help but say to yourself, If trouble had to come, why the hell couldn't it wait until I made it through to the light at the other end?