Slice

BUCKHEAD STATION

Only two detectives were in the squad room, Eichord and Brown, each slumped over a desk, each with a phone growing out of their ear, on separate missions, each muttering into a hunk of plastic whose microphone apertures retained the traces of ten thousand breath mints, a quarter-century of cancerous tobacco smoke, a couple of tons of burgers with onions, a small lake of back-to-work tighteners, eight million heartaches in the big, naked city, nine million hours on hold, or, as Chink and Chunk might have said, ten million Wong numbers in Chinatown alone.

“Hello?” Nothing. Nothing but a clicking noise in Eichord's ear. He was calling a TV station to try to keep the lid on the exploding resurrection of the Lonely Hearts case. No please hold, no please stand by, no please please please, just click. Not even a simple “We're too busy to talk right now but if you'll shove the phone receiver up your ass a proctologist will be with you in a couple of weeks.” Finally a few more clicks and a lilting voice told him he'd made contact with the mother ship.

“Ginny Snow please,” he told the voice, and he sat there waiting while it went one ringy-dingy and two ringy-dingies, and finally another voice and another click and Whom shall I say would like an audience with her highness? Eichord was singing tunelessly to himself as he sorted through the voluminous crime-scene reports that now threatened to shove his desk down through the floor, the voice in his ear stabbing him back to life and he began a soft-shoe tap dance with a local television anchorwoman, conning her for all he was worth, doing his best to keep the lid on this thing.

Finally, his task accomplished, he thanked her, made the obligatory promises about dispensing information, all the usual media bullshit, and hung up. Sighed. Checked his directory and then remembered he had a call card on her and dialed Letty Budge over at the Buckhead News-Gazette, slipped his feet back into his patent-leather dancing shoes, and started tapping again.

Letty was a total pro who bought nary a word of it, so he gave up his scam and leveled with her. They were friends. She was a responsible journalist. Blah blah. He needed some slack, and he needed it now. Finally, one more odious task was completed, with promises of exclusivity, a bit of a ribbing about “trying to pull her chain,” and he'd managed to buy a few more precious hours.

Eichord knew what it was like when a city was swept up in the awful tide of a pattern of serial crimes. One of his primary functions beyond apprehending serial killers was to placate the media, pure and simple. He was by now such a high-profile cop that anything from him was newsworthy and he didn't blink an eye at using the press the way they so often used him. He didn't like it. He wasn't crazy about it. But it was a vitally important part of his job to keep the flow of ink as managed as he possibly could under the circumstances.

More phone calls. The mock-ups of Bunkowski were almost ready. He told somebody he'd be over in an hour and a half and wanted three copies of everything, plus the master for the new expanded circulars he figured they'd be saturating the town with soon enough. More details. More paper logjam to cut through.

And then, for just a few moments, Jack sat there at the desk in a kind of stupor, listening to Brown murmur in the background, and he thought about his nemesis, Chaingang.

Where are you? What are you doing with that little baby you ripped from the girl in Chattanooga? Why did you take it? Here was a beast who had come back from the dead. Something that ate human hearts. Mutilated. Tortured. Fed. Cannibalized. Gorged to capacity until its vast, demonic hunger was satiated. WHAT IN THE NAME OF CHRIST WOULD IT DO WITH A TINY BABY? He could hardly stand to think of the possibilities.

While his mind was temporarily in the floating state of hold he seized the opportunity to begin what he called his mnemonic doodle. Years ago he'd taken some courses in speed-reading, improved retention, various self-improvement studies designed to aid him in his work. He'd found mnemonic devices well suited to his work style. Mnemonics gave him a way of retaining large amounts of seemingly unrelated data in a manner that was particularly useful when his ever-present pocket recorder wasn't filing it all away on cassette for him.

In an interrogation or during an impromptu interview or at a busy crime scene he could file away reactions, responses, facts, figures, anything imaginable with his mnemonic system. He'd committed over sixty graphic, numerical images to memory, and these are what he drew now as he began doodling:

1. A picture of a gun beside the number.

2. Glue. A bottle of glue tipped over. Spilled. A lake of sticky glue.

3. A crudely drawn tree.

4. Open door.

5. A hive swarming with bees.

6. A pile of sticks.

7. A billowy cloud with the word “HEAVEN."

8.

Eichord stopped his mnemonic doodle in midstream and thought about the realities of what faced him. He knew what his chances were against this seemingly unstoppable monster.

8. ATE. The things it ate. He doodled an enormous heart with his felt-tip pen and began shading in perspective. Drawing to kill time like some little kid in study hall waiting for the bell and the summertime playground ball game, he doodled the phrase “TO KILL TIME,” and he drew a clock with a dagger in it.

The thing had been honing its skills. Dieting. Starving, no doubt. Healing from Jack's pathetic attempts to destroy it, planning its revenge with the acute foresight of a presentient being, killing for pleasure as always. Killing for the basic love of taking human life, guided by the unerring premonitions and previsions that were the gifts to be enjoyed by this rare subspecies of humanity.

He looked at the drawing of the gun beside the number one and his mind slipped back into gear. He got up from the desk and started up the stairs. His chances were marginal. He smiled to think of it. At the moment he didn't care. Later he could think about it to his heart's content and pee his pants in mortal terror.

He went out of the building and drove to a pawn shop nearby run by the cop's unofficial gunsmith, Shorty Wallhausen.

“Hey."

“Yo."

“Can't change y'r mind?"

“Nope."

“Okay. I still say if it was me I'd take and get me something like this.” He was holding a .45 Colt in his big fist. It was pointing at the ceiling and it had jumped into his hand from out of nowhere.

“If I could handle one the way you can, I would. But I'm dirt worthless with one of those."

“You don't have to be Wild Bill fucking Hickock, baby. Just blow about seven dollars’ worth of Teflon-coated KTW power load in his general direction. WAX that mother-flogger."

“I trust this,” Jack said, lifting his heavy fourteen-inch cardboard box of steel and grip. Shorty held out his hand and Eichord relinquished it. He always enjoyed watching somebody like Wallhausen when he examined a weapon. Any kind of weapon. It was watching a master craftsman with a fine, precision tool. He showed so much respect for the ability of the thing, such a great affinity for it. It was just a kind of awe for the purity of the professionalism. Now he felt nothing.

“Well,” Shorty said, taking one of the thick red shells by its brass base and holding it up in the light, “you got your basic death hurricane here.” He wiped off the brass as he checked the sides of the waxy container, shoving the two shells into place, wiping the exterior of the amputated shotgun as he returned it to its innocuous resting place in the box. “The master blaster."

“Let's hope,” Eichord said quietly.

“Remember our deal. You have to use this on our boy, you doctored the loads yourself."

“That's right, I did."

“Now let's see how you did it,” he said, as he handed Jack a hunting knife. “Open the crimp."

“Like this."

“No.” Shorty showed him, making it look easy.

“Okay."

“Shake everything out."

He did so, and the little lethal pellets rattled into the metal pan.

“Now watch how I load the crystals.” Shorty stuffed the crystalline poison in, repacking the pellets at the same time. “I'm not doing it right, but just so you know how to, if you have to prove you done it. Okay? Now you take an’ give this a shot, and a little epoxy"—add a teaspoon of nitro, a pinch of oregano—"and crimp ‘er back ‘n wipe all the excess. That's an easy way to do it,” he told him, making it look easy again.

“Gotcha. I ‘preciate it a lot. Shorty."

“Nothin’ to it. Jus’ do it."

“Long as it gets the job done."

“Put ‘er this way, pohdna'. You hit a rhinoceros in the big TOE with this load an’ that sucker's dead ‘fore he can FALL."

“That MIGHT do it,” Eichord said, meaning it. “Thanks.” He had little faith in guns, and for damn good reason as he looked at his own sorry track record. He had little faith in his own judgment, seeing as how it had caused his pal Jimmie Lee to die a horrendous and sudden death. He had, when you get right down to it, very little faith in anything right at this moment. He went out and started his car and to his relief it didn't explode.

Jack missed the hell out of his wife. He thought of her more than he'd planned since the bit of hopeful misdirection at the airport. He wished he could talk to her right now. Just hear that sweet voice over the phone. To be able to whisper love talk. To tell her the honeymoon WASN'T over, that there'd be better days. To tell her that nobody said “commence” anymore.

He thought of a bad joke one of the guys had told him about hazard pay, danger pay, something like that. He suddenly felt very cold at the thought of flying solo on this one, but he knew the MO of Daniel Bunkowski. To insulate himself and hide behind a shield of cops would achieve nothing. It would only delay the inevitable confrontation. It would mean more uncertainty for everyone, more innocent victims would surely die. It was better to let this thing come to a head. Easy to say, but when the bull's-eye is painted on your back it's another matter.

He ached so bad with the loss of Jimmie he could put himself at risk again in the hopes of drawing the killer out in the open. This time Eichord wasn't going to miss. No matter what. The man they called Chaingang would die.

For all the pissing and moaning about his status as a media darling there was an up side to it. He could manipulate the ink. His tendency to be nonconfrontational with the brass, somewhere between iconoclast and ass-kisser, had a curious side effect. The powers had now begun to believe the press THEY had created as a buffer between the police and the public. To them Jack had in fact become a supersleuth. It was the way they looked at things. You said something enough times with a perfectly straight face and it came to pass. A nutty sort of egoistic self-confidence bred of supreme power of authority.

But their attitude resulted in Eichord having autonomy now when it came to this sort of situation. And since he was the one who would pay in spades for having allowed Bunkowski to come back, as it were, from the grave—he was going to go for broke. Make himself as vulnerable and unprotected as he could and let the monster come for him. He wanted it one-to-one now. But most of all he just wanted it to be done with.

For a second he could visualize Lee watching him and he said softly, “We'll get him. Chink.” And for a second he was the Eichord of old and he looked in the rearview mirror and intoned, “Or my name isn't Michael Lanyard."