Stone Shadow

Dallas

Martin Scorsese it ain't, but each tape begins with a pro slate like a TV commercial or something. And this one says:

A/N SURVEILLANCE

VCR V-3102-H WH/14

PROPERTY: HOMICIDE

And in a different handwriting:

Hackabee #14

The shot is from over Eichord's right shoulder. The resolution—grainy.

“Hi, Jack. No pun intended. Suppose I start by saying hello in a perfectly normal fashion. No tricks. No logorhumbano horizontal bopping of the cerebellum,” it sounded like he said, and Eichord interjected, “'Scuse me. I don't know the word logorhumbano. Define please?"

“Whoops.” He smiled. “Clarity is in order. I said, no LOGO-RHUMBA no word dancing, a coined word, no lofo-rhumbas, no horizontal bop, dig?"

“Okay."

“I begin with ordinary speech. Relating, say, to the weather. I say, ‘Nice day, Officer.’ You go, ‘Nice day,’ in reply. I tell you how it looks like it's too cold to snow but snow is predicted. Or I tell you how I love the smell of rain. Or whatever mundane weather fact. Or I say, ‘Didja’ see those Giants? How's about that playoff game, eh? Kicked the stuff outta the Redskins. Who do you like in the Super Bowl?’ And you think, Hey, gee, this is a regular person, after all. And we begin fresh. See where I'm coming from?"

“Uh huh,” Eichord said.

“Idea here is that we reestablish my credibility as a human being. Because I want to talk to you, Jack. I want to tell you how I did it. I want to lay it all out for you and try my damnedest not to go off on one of my goofy word-flights, because it's important somebody understands what they've got in Ukie Hackabee. So first I've got to build up a little credibility and you might say belief insurance—so here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to give you some dead people. A whole bunch of them. Isn't that exciting? So you're taking notes, the tapes are rolling, I assume, and let's just pitch right in to the nasty business at hand. I'd like to begin with a cute little number who I picked up in fact not too many miles from this very spot. She's in a nice deep grave waiting for you right now, even as we speak. Do you know where the reservoir is?” And he began a nonstop tirade of talk that ran for twenty-two minutes. In twenty-two minutes he gave up another grave every two and a half minutes roughly. In twenty-two minutes of wild and crazed conversation and rambling reminiscing he told Eichord and the men and women at the monitors where they could disinter nine more victims. Exact almost pinpoint locations. He'd obviously rehearsed this in his mind overnight.

“Can you think of any more?” Eichord prodded gently when Ukie had apparently run out of steam.

“I can think hundreds more, my friend. Thing is, I have to have something for something. I want my uke and I want an adequate channel of communication for legal representation assured me. I want confidentiality for my new attorney. I want—I want to be treated with respect. I don't want that weinie-wagger shit in my file. I want...” He trailed off with a pleasant expression on his face. “So. Are you ready to hear how I did it, or would you prefer to wait until the bodies are dug up so you know I'm for real?"

“No, Ukie. Go ahead. I believe you."

“Right,” he said, expelling a huge stream of air, breathing in deeply and beginning, “I asked you when last we chatted about your familiarity with palingenetic phylogeny, and sacerdotalism, syncretism, things of a decidedly mystical and paradoxical nature but nonetheless important to your comprehension of the god-and-icons thing but you detuned and I went off the wall and that's why today I thought it was so important to prove to you I was real on this thing. Look, Jack. I just gave you more bodies. You know those bodies didn't just go into those graves and jump in and cover themselves with earth, right?"

“Right."

“So now that I'm on that kind of footing with you and you find out for yourself that Ukie is the king of killers of ALL TIME, just like the Champ,” he said in a Muhammad Ali voice that made Eichord smile unexpectedly, “well, then, please keep an open mind and let me try and explain it all to you."

“Fair enough,” Jack said, shaking his head a little.

“But you GOTTA know the territory, like the song says. Don't rule anything out just ‘cause it sounds weird, folks. Okay. This is so ... Oh, jeez, I just can't get into it all it's so spooky and vast and wonderful and awesome. Like where to start. Okay. Okay. I know if I start taking you back through all this you're going to tune out on me again but you have to understand the background or everything is meaningless. It is power, Jack. Such as you can't and never will be able to fathom and it doesn't just spring from nowhere."

“Power."

“The power of ... Before I tell you. I know you said you believe in God. No doubt you also believe in the devil. But for just a second put the thoughts of good and evil out of your head and look at this objectively. Forget the fallacies of Pythagorean and Plutarchean quasimoralities, the metaphysics of the Orphic and anthropo-morphic deities, the dubious disciplines of the gnostic and Nichomachean, the orgiastic and cathartic, the Shinto and Shugendo, the Taoistic, Maoistic, Confuscian, and confusing dialects and analects and sects and sex of the spastics and the flagellants and the secular and the ecclesiastical and the Mikkyo and the Ogolala shaman and the Hellenistic beliefs and spiritual suckering that forms the thick crust of so-called religious thought from asceticism to Zoroaster."

“You're losing me."

“Yeah. Okay. Start over. How do you know you believe in God? HE didn't just part the clouds one day and in a booming, thunderous voice proclaim to Moses Eichord the way it was gonna be. You learned from Mom and Pop. The Church. Sunday school. Relatives. Friends. Friends and relations on weekend vacations. Half-remembered tribal prayers, incantations passed from generation to generation, inscriptions in the stone memories of proud and noble ruins, monoliths carved by illiterates yet meant to be seen from the sky, dusty dogma and rotting ritual, surviving mysteries on crumbling papyrus, fragments of ancient urns from long-disintegrated cities, holy places gone to dust, stagnant sacraments and vestigial words of worship found in sunken cities of the dead, and it was ever thus from the blue waters of the Aegean Sea to the muddy Miss, we learned from the Word. God does not assert himself/herself, nor does Satan. Sitting at the knee of Isis, Serapis, Attis, Sabazios, Hecate, Medea, Persephone, Earth Mother Mary, basking in the katachthonian subworld's revenge and the cultist muck of Steve Holland deification, some cunt—excuse my French—passed along the marvelous, mystical, magical, mixed-up mystery of good and evil. But what if indeed there is no moral wrong or right but only superimposed force that we will refer to as phantasmagoria. It, asexual and omnisexual, neither he nor she, It upper-case, is to the existence of thought what a constantly shifting, complex sucession of optical effects and fluctuating scenes, seen or imagined, is to the vision? Eh? Then by the yellowed yarmulke of Yahweh, by the turquoise turnips of the Tetragrammaton, by the crimson chronology of the Anti-Christ, by the dirty dipstick of the Dionysiacs, then we must reexamine and reevaluate our sources of power.

“Now you must deal with a source of force. A wellspring. A centering so deep within the core that it cannot be reached by ordinary means. It is to concentration what brain surgery is to a headache. It is to focus what a shish-kebab skewer in the cortex is to a toothpick in the canapes. It would be to t'ai chi ch'uan, moo duk kwan tang soo do, hapkido, tae kwon do, wushu, and Shaolin kung fu, and any of that other chop-suey bullshit like hwa rang do, dim mak, and dim ching, what nuclear devastation is to a firecracker.

“I call it the Way of the Viper and I would explain it to you as a nonmystical secret martial philosophy that impinges upon what you would wrongly label the Satanic. It draws on the rarest of all the secret combat ryus, exemplified in the mythological parable of a knight in quest of a great dragon; he confronts the beast, knowing it can easily incinerate him, and as the dragon laughs, a tiny viper slithers out of the shadow of the dragon and delivers his poisonous bite of death. The Way of the Viper takes as his power source the unending, black, limitless energy core of eternity. The dark, surging, mindless, insatiable, voracious, deadly, all-vanquishing force that has been here since before the universe began."

And for the next five or six minutes, what seemed like an hour to Eichord, Jack patiently listened as Ukie took him on another of his little mind-fuck airplane rides, Jack thinking as he listened to the animated tones and the sureness of the rhythms listening with a tenth of his concentration to “—this formidable power source of magnified chi or—” snatches of the monologue in case he would need to interject a brief response. Ukie's fantasy was populated by real dragons and vipers, but the question was, first, was he sane? Eichord would leave that to the experts to determine the range and quality of his psychopathia/psychoses.

Second, or perhaps first, was the question of how he did it. This was no martial-arts expert. This was a Texas liar and a wienie-wagger and a con artist who saw a chance for something—but what? Publicity? Notoriety? There was a reason why the con job. The same guy who was so afraid of the truth now had openly copped. No question that Ukie had offed those people. He was a murderer, clearly. Why not simply tell how he did it? Was somebody else involved? It was a strong possibility. It would explain how a nonmuscle dude might make the transition. It would explain the conning, to some extent. And how was Noel Collier and Company involved? Why not ask?

“—through the focus of intensity which is called the Secret Gate of—"

“Uh, whoa, there, Ukie. Hey. Listen, Jones, Seleska, Foy, Biegelman, and Guthrie?"

“Hmmmm?"

“I understand this is the law firm representing you, zat right?"

“Maybe. Could be,” he said coyly.

“Noel Collier. That's one famous lady."

“Nice-lookin’ quiff too, there, Jack. I'll have the bitch begging for some of Sly before I'm through with her delicious ass."

“Uh huh. I'll be talking to her later today. I'll be sure and tell her you said that, okay? I'm sure that will be an added incentive for her to take the case."

Ukie chuckled mirthlessly. “Hey, Tex, I don't give a fat fuck what you tell her. She'd take me on as a ‘case,’ as you put it, if I tell her to and it's that simple.” Jack had reached him.

“The Way of the Viper and the Dragon, huh? That's some line bullshit, Mr. Hackabee. Thing I'm wondering is—why? We nailed you with shovel in hand at a crime scene. You give us the bodies. You just don't tell us why. So let's say we never figure it all out and you're too clever for us. So nu? So big deal. You go to your just rewards with nobody knowing whatever it is you have going for you. Obviously you're a mean motor scooter, all right, but if you don't want to be serious with us about your methodology, it just makes it look like you had one or more accomplices."

“That's a load of shit, man! I did those people all alone! Why would I—” He stopped yelling and Jack could see the concentration working, Ukie feeling himself losing it, fighting to keep control. “Why would I need anybody but me? Oh, shit, aaaaaah.” And at that he suddenly got the giggles and there was that flicker of recognition in the eyes that said, Shit, you hooked me that time. All right, copper, that's one for your side. And he said, “I admire your style. That was very deft."

“Deft?"

“Deft, man, you know, as in facile, smooth, able, skillful, dexterous, adroit, sure, expert-fucking DEFT. Christ, I gotta get a Roget's so we can talk, you need a fucking interpreter to understand English."

“You could buy me a little pocket dictionary with your advance you get from the book contract. Not to mention the movie contract."

Ukie was quiet.

“I assume that's what Noel Collier is for, right?"

“You assume wrong, Sherlock Homeboy. No book. No movie. And we made a deal. I gave you bodies. You give me attorney confidentiality. That means no mikes. No cameras. No bullshit surveillance. No—"

“I don't recall making a deal like that with you at all, Ukie, but I'd certainly be willing to if I could make those kinds of guarantees, Unfortunately I can't. Those sorts of deals have to be negotiated. And with the killer of the century, or however you put it when you were describing yourself, you can see why you'd have some pretty heavy-duty surveillance. What if you'd suddenly concentrate real hard while you were making potty and the Way of the Viper would wipe out a wall. You'd be gone. We'd look dumb. Dallas cops are tired of looking dumb. So that's a problem. On the other hand, attorney-client privilege and confidentiality is guaranteed you, as you know. What can I say? All I can do is tell you that if you don't cooperate with us, if you blow verbal smoke screens and play mind games with us, it's not going to help you. It simply isn't in Ukie Hackabee's best interests."

“That's your opinion. I disagree."

“Well, I'll be glad to come back and talk with you if you want to give us more solid information, but this other stuff...” Eichord dismissed it with a gesture. “What can I tell you? You're just spinning, your wheels and ours. Pointless. So ... smoke it over.” Jack got up and headed for the door. “And maybe we'll talk again."