Stone Shadow

Buckhead Station

Jack Eichord looked like shit. He was drinking too much. He wasn't getting enough sleep. He was irritable and apprehensive about nothing and just generally felt awful. He was getting his own diagnosis confirmed by one Detective Sergeant James Lee, who was breathing toxic fumes on him and berating his condition and attitude as they sat side by side in the cramped and filthy detective squad room in the basement of Buckhead Station.

“You don't seem to give a shit anymore, like I said."

“It isn't that—"

“Don't tell me it isn't that. I know when you're giving a shit and when you ain't, Kemo Sabe, and you don't act like you care. You been just walking through it. I been knowin’ you too long, man. I know when you're here and when you are out to lunch, dig?"

Eichord just shook his head at the Oriental cop whom he'd worked with for so many years.

“You got an attitude all of a sudden, that's another thing. When Jack fuckin’ EICHORD, straight-arrow crime-crusher and Mr. Never-give-up gets an attitude on the job it's something a friend notices, believe me."

“Make sense, for Chrissakes,” Jack said, smilingly, but feeling sour.

“You walked through this Cassarelli thing like you weren't here. Like you didn't give a rat fuck. Just because it wasn't some big mass homicide with three hundred dead people in a locked room, and Jack haffin’ to fly in and figure out who put the cyanide in the fucking Kool-Aid—I mean, you're still on the job, my man. And since when don't you give a hundred fucking percent. Eh?"

“Gimme a break."

“Huh?"

“Cassarelli was a piece of shit. Another tap dance. What's to have an attitude about? I'm just tired of going through the motions for looks. You knew the perp was gonna end up walking. I knew he was gonna walk. HE knew he was gonna walk. His fucking lawyer knew. His honor the nitwit judge knew the fucking captain knew my dead Aunt Sarah knew. Everybody knew. So what's to get an attitude about?"

“That's what I mean, right there. Since when do I hear that kind of shit outta your mouth?"

“I'm just tired, I guess,” Eichord admitted. “I need to back off it for a while. Take another vacation or something."

“Bullshit. You just came back from fucking vacation two, what was it—three months ago. You said it bored the stones offa ya."

“Well—"

“You look like shit. You're drinking too much. You don't get enough sleep. You're hanging around here night and day and you got the social life of a monk with herpes."

“A monk with herpes? What the hell does that mean?"

“You're drinking again, my man. And it worries me."

“I'm not drinking one fucking bit more than I always drink."

“You are half-blitzed on the job, kiddo. Don't bullshit a bullshitter. You stink like a fuckin’ brewery half the time."

“Christ.” Eichord fought back a smile.

“I'm not jokin’ with ya, man. And everybody's saying stuff about it. I mean the captain—on the Cassarelli thing—he was talkin’ to me one day and you'd been in his face and he goes"—Jimmy Lee fanned a hand over his face—"tell the bartender to cut back on the vermouth, this gin tastes funny.” They both chuckled. “And you know that bar rag, shit Jackson, he's never seen the noon hour without at least two coffee cups of Gordon's under his king-size 56. So when that son of a bitch says you stink of booze you gotta smell like a broken bottle of Fuzzy Navel."

“I hope I didn't stink as bad as you do right now, you smell like you're wet and on fire.” Eichord turned to fan a hand over his face.

“I hope this pungent cigarette is not the object of your scorn. This doesn't bother you, does it?” Lee said, blowing a huge cloud of poisonous smoke directly at Jack.

“Come on, man,” Eichord said, fanning furiously. “I mean, if you wanna get cancer, that's fine, but don't—"

“This is the smoking section of the room, my man.” James Lee pointed at the crudely lettered sign that hung next to one with the printed legend A-1 DETECTIVE AGENCY, NO JOB TOO SMALL. Someone had penciled out “job” and written “dick.” And someone else had written “eat me.” And another shaky hand had Eichord's cop mind instinctively matching the “eat me” with the printed urinal art in the upstairs men's room, “Want to see a joke, look in your hand,” under which somebody else had scrawled, “Look in BOTH HANDS, you mean.” What flakes.

“You're telling me it is,” Eichord said, feeling sicker by the second. “And if you do that again, I'm gonna puke all over that shitty-looking suit."

“That is a $350 mohair, Special Agent Eichord, courtesy of Bon Tons. I just flogged it. You like?” He shot his cuffs.

“Wonderful. Too bad they didn't have your size."

“I got a special deal.” Lee smiled inscrutably.

“Yeah, you boosted the fucker. I don't wanna hear about it."

“You gotta take something. Buddy Lintz gets pissed. He thinks you don't like him you don't take some threads."

“Oh, I'm sure Buddy just loves to have coppers flog $350 suits off him. Must make his day."

“Make my day, mother-fuckers,” a huge man boomed from the stairway. It was fat Dana Tuny, called “Chunk” Tuny throughout Buckhead Station, and the longtime partner of James Lee—known as the legendary homicide team of Chink and Chunk.

“Hay-ZOOS! It stinks like a mother-grabber down here. I gotta get a straight goin’ to cut the smell.” The big detective grabbed a cancer stick out of his partner's pack and lit it with a gold Dunhill, letting out a huge plume of foul carcinogens.

“Morning, asshole,” Lee said to him. “I was just telling Eichord he looked like shit."

Eichord nodded hello.

“That's no lie, Jack. You look like fuckin’ walking death, man, whatsa matter witcha—you on the sauce again?"

Eichord laughed. “Real subtle, Dana."

“I just got done tellin’ him, man. He better cut back a couple of quarts a day."

“Well, girls,” Tuny said, shifting his poundage from his partner's back, “I'm goin’ across the street. You guys want some doughnut holes?"

When he'd gone back up the stairs, Lee said softly to Eichord, “All the ha-ha aside, you do look bad and you are drinking too much, and if I know YOU gotta know, not being the type who kids himself."

“You can't imagine how much these free consultations help me, Doctor. How long have you practiced? Not counting today.” But underneath the bantering Eichord was well aware of what his longtime friend and colleague was trying to say so subtly: he did look like shit and he wasn't getting enough sleep and he was crankier than he had any reason to be, and the thing was, he was drinking too much and he could feel himself slipping into the big black hole again. Its power was sucking at him, pulling him mercilessly down into the viscid swamp that all alcoholics got to know so well. It was like a club where you had an honorary lifelong membership.

Cassarelli was just a name on a stiff's corpse—the shop name for a case that had ended like so many others, with what Eichord thought of as a tap dance. In this case, a legal tap dance where the victim fed the worms and the bad guys walked. Of course it was never that simple. Nothing was ever simple, clear-cut, open and shut, black and white, dead-bang. Everything had to be a big, complicated, unresolved, dragged-out, mishmash where lawyers and judges grew wealthy on the mind-battering, maddening opaqueness and inequities of turnstile justice.

He had thought more than once that he'd put “tap dancer” on his next 1040 form. Let the fucking IRS chew on that one. That's the way he thought of himself. Tagged as a quasi “serial murder expert,” a misnomer that the press resurrected from time to time whenever media could stir up some numbers with a good, juicy crime story, he was perceived in-house as the ultimate tap dancer. A glorified PR man who could present a public face to media that offered a bit of both worlds, the public-relations stroke job in tandem with a credible body that was actually out there in the trenches.

They used him and he supposed he used the limelight himself, if not for the ego nurturing for the perks of the job that came from the added clout. Grease that could lubricate implacable, rusty cogs of bureaucracy and business. Muscle to open or close doors, wedges, chisels, tools to break loose long-submerged facts in the information log jam. A high profile to draw out a certain kind of potential informant who would be pulled to the aura of celebrity like moths to the candle.

But at what point do you expose so much of yourself to media that your life begins to be a kind of comic book? His endless stories about Dr. Demented, the whacko dentist whom he'd nailed because of a sick junkie informant, and the big case that had taken him from Buckhead Station north to Chicago, the Lonely Hearts murders, he'd talked about all these ancient crimes so often the memories had become illusory and unreal. Had they occurred at all?

“You don't seem to give a shit anymore,” Lee said. You change so much with the years. With the job. His achievements had been talked about so much they'd become little more than blurry postcards, sent back from weird pit stops on his trip through the heart of darkness. Lee was dead wrong. He thought to himself, Shit is all I give, pal.

And it was dragging him down into the depths just like his drowning dream.

“Come on,” he would hear the two boys shout. Even recalling their names from childhood. The Demented Dentist he couldn't recall, but Whortley Williams and Cabrey Brown he remembered forty years later. Go figure it

“Come on, ya sissy."

“I ain't no sissy."

“Jack's a sissy. A mama's boy!"

“Yeah, he's too chicken shit to swim out this far. Sissy boy!"

And in his frightening dream Jack would swim out past the pier pilings where his folks had told him never to swim, out there in the water so deep no one had ever touched bottom, out over the black hole that was measured in measureless fathoms, out where little boys had no business.

“What a sissy. Can't even swim underwater,” Cabrey Brown taunted him.

“Can so."

“Prove it."

“Huh?"

“Let's see ya swim underwater. Swim over here to us. It's only about fifteen or twenty feet. I'll bet you're chicken shit."

“Yeah,” Whortley Williams, the other bully, dared him. “Too chicken shit to swim underwater. Chicken shit mama's boy."

“Hell I am,” Jack said as he took a huge breath, filling his lungs with lake air and diving down into the inky black, strong arms pulling, legs scissoring as he swam toward the boys, hard breaststrokes underwater, eyes squinted tight in the cold, muddy lake water, and oh God suddenly something has him caught like a vise the boys are holding him as he tries to thrash out with his arms and legs twisting pulling, no good can't pull free they are bigger and stronger and the two of them have got him and they're holding him under the water and he's fighting to break free and he can't and in the thrashing, heart-pounding panic he tries to scream and swallows about three gallons of foul lake water choking drowning all his air gone screaming without a voice, crying fainting blacking out into death and suddenly waking up bathed in cold sleep sweat and sheet-soaked terror knowing the hangover isn't as bad as it could be. Just grateful now to be awake on the edge of the dream and not dead at the bottom of Sugar Lake. Grateful he can swing his legs out of bed in a minute and that it isn't one of those real ass-kicker headaches that start way behind the eyes somewhere, drilling through the brain, making waking up such a challenge that you keep your eyes closed and the covers over your head, the alky's wake-up call.

But the dream and the fuzzy head combined make it a bad beginning and even then in that jarring self-realization, in those few seconds when you're still honest with yourself, you know you won't be able to get through the day without some medicine. And you wake up anticipating the astringent mouthwash gargle, the taste of the toothpaste, and that first eye-opener. And you light up like the glowing tubes inside an old-time console radio at the thought of that first taste and you know it's starting to take you back down again.

Jack's regimen would be to aim for that kitchen. Get his big coffeecup and fill it full of ice cubes. Splash in four or five ounces of Daniel's. Run a tablespoon or two of tap water across the top and suck some of the medicine right down. Ummmmm. Shudder. Damn. Yes oh Cheerist yes. Ummm. All gone. Jackie drank his medicine down like a good boy. Let's do it again. Shit. This day looks a lot better already. And he'd fill that big cup again and never mind the tap water this time. The ice is starting to melt. The glow permeates. That's how it starts.

He could feel it dragging him down just the way it had before. It had started for him so many years ago. It started way back when he knew there weren't going to be any more heroes. (Of all the ridiculous damn excuses!) Stop and think—from the time the big mushroom cloud billowed below the bomb bay of the Enola Gay we hadn't had too many heroic images. The post—Jack Armstrong years of atomic comic television had seen the last of the heroes.

Even real heroes and media darlings like the vegetable hero Chavez, or the fire hero Adair, they'd never been elevated to the status of the heroic personas we once believed in as a nation. Remember the old war heroes like Stillwell and Chennault and Audie Murphy? Imagine a heroic image coming out of the steaming jungles of Southeast Asia. We wouldn't be checking out any movies called Huey Doorgunner over Ben Hoa or Danang Diary. The closest we could get was Stallone or Norris in some Mittyesque/Revenge/Guilt-for-the-MIAs scenario. Good night, Chesty.

Why was it so all-fired important that the heroes had vanished? The astronauts, the last legitimate hero personas, they seemed to evanesce in the dissipation of Skylab jokes. Who did kids look up to—some faggot rock star with about a gram of snort shoved up each nostril? A pro athlete with one hand on his scrapbook and the other on his $497,000 contract? The heroes had vaporized in the shock waves. And Eichord's core, filled with the detritus of midlife, covered with the eluvium from the Force 17 hurricane of time and technology, fought for air and went down for the third time.

“Just because it wasn't some big mass homicide with three hundred dead people in a locked room ... “Lee had chastized him, “You're still on the job. And since when don't you give a hundred fucking percent?"

I got news, Jimmy old darlin'. Check it out. A hundred fucking percent of zero is zero. Besides that, you wily little Oriental son of a bitch, you scrutable old bastard, you shouldn't hang around me if you can't take a joke, Eichord thought, and reached for the comfort of the half-pint of black Jack he now carried with him. It'll all work out, he thought. Or it won't.