Iceman

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 entrance 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?