Stone Shadow

Garland

He had his own official loaner and he almost took it but he was into something, his mind on oily lock and load, and he just couldn't face the Big D traffic, the meet with the illustrious female counselor, and all the little furry things scampering around the dark, cobwebbed recesses of his mind, so he let Wally Michaels VIP him again with a driver, and he sat on the passenger side with a notepad, doodling, working on a headache.

This was one of his crossword-type doodles he'd been working on for an hour or so back in the squad room and he was still chewing on the words. Tuning out everything, letting his mind slip and slide, float free as he doodled out the puzzle or anagram or acrostic or whateverinhell it would prove to be.

At the lower left there was the neatly printed list of homicide victims. Just names on corpses to him. He would start with just the positives. The victims who were tied together in the jumble of mixed MOs, tied only in death, by circumstance, time lines, geographical linkages, forensics, perhaps entrance wounds made by plunging steel from the same knife blade. Joined in death by the random madness of Mr. Hackabee and/or perpetrators unknown.

It began with a vertical HAMMONTREEE, FLIPPO coming across from the left horizontally and the Os overlapping. BECK sharing the final E. The name COPELAND dropping down from the C in BECK. SCHUMACHER interlocking with the E. COY and VACCA vertically off it down to the bottom of the page. There had been a SMITH and he added it in above.

All polygraphs on Ukie totally inconclusive. Par for the pollies. All psych testing inconclusive. All everything inconclusive.

Jack was grateful when they pulled up in front of the financial institution in which Jones-Seleska was ensconced.

Eichord looked at the gorgeous countenance of a blond, blue-eyed receptionist who was everyone's cheerleader fantasy, eyes and mouth that promised 1001 ecstatic nights, lips made to drive a man insane with lust and longing, a pair of legs designed to make feeble octogenarians throw away their crutches, a pair of mammary glands drawn by Ward, face by Moran, neck courtesy of Modigliani, and he knew instantly that these people were his kind of people.

“Hi,” she breathed, and she really meant it. Not just a hello. Huh UH. This was HI. She was serious about it.

“Hi,” he said with his usual flair for repartee.

“Can I help you?” she breathed, washing the Jones-Seleska lobby in some sort of fragrance that cannot be bottled and sold over the counter. It has been ruled illegal in all fifty states and in Puerto Rico. It is called Oil of Sub Rosa and it is used in clinical experiments by mad scientists who are working on ways to give erections to the elderly.

“Uh,” he said with that suavity that was always there at his fingertips whenever he needed it. “Yeah. Uh, I have an appointment with Miss Collier.” Jeez, he thought instantly, I shoulda said MIZZ Collier.

“And your name, sir?” And what she meant was, “Would you care to spread my legs and take me right here at the desk?” That's the TONE, you understand, even though she said, “And your name, sir,” it was a definite invitation, Eichord felt. And he told her his name in response and she said the sexiest thing he'd ever heard. She told him to “Please take a seat.” Well, my God in heaven, he surely would. How about HERS? And he'd barely had time to drool over these possibilities when Mizzzzz Collier's secretary came out to greet him with the most erotic smile he'd ever been given by a stranger and this woman, SHE made the receptionist look like a GUY. Jeezus! He'd never seen anything like it in his life. He was going to love Dallas, no question about it. This secretary looked like a movie star. We're talking Holly-wild, folks. Blond, blue-eyed cheerleader beautiful again. The finished, polished version of the one sitting at the switchboard. Just insanity. She was moving toward him and he tried to stand.

“Mr. Eichord?” she said in such a voice that angels would be jealous, and a finger of desire traced a hot, burning line across his groin.

“Yes, I have an appointment with Ms. Collier."

“Hi"—what a smile—"I'm Noel,” the vision said, taking his limp hand in hers for a second, sending shock waves through his libido. “Let's go in my office,” she said as she ended the perfunctory handshake, turning and letting him have a good look at the rest of the package as she strode down a plushly carpeted corridor with Eichord hot, so to speak, on her heels.

He knew now what Jones-Sexy-leska had done. They had taken the senior partners of the law firm to a Dallas Cowboys game and the guys had seen the cheerleaders and they'd gone a little bonkers. So they'd hired away a few of the sexiest ones, given them low-cut tops and short skirts, and had them act as receptionists and secretaries. Then they'd taken the sexiest one, put her in expensive, tailored suits, and $300 heels, and told her to pretend that she was a lawyer named Noel Collier. They had tried to call her Noel Coward but they figured that was going a little too far, so they settled.

This was the ULTIMATE cheerleader fantasy. Oh, Lord. Ohmigoodness, yes. Eichord loved everything about women. Their minds, mostly. Yes, he loved the way their minds worked. When others drooled over big boobs or long legs encased in wispy hosiery or bedroom eyes or Lorenesque mouths, he was into minds. He genuinely adored women and the mysterious and loverly way their minds worked.

But—yes, sports fans—next to that he loved the part of the anatomy one sits upon. He was what you call your basic ass-man, or as the feminists would say, your basic ass. He loved the special look and feel of a tight, high, perfect, female derriere. A great-looking ass could, as the expression has it, turn him around.

So by the time Noel Collier had reached the end of the corridor, rounding third and sliding into home, and he'd experienced the profoundly moving experience of following those two little possums wiggling in a gunnysack, he was completely ready to drop to his knees there on her office broadloom and propose marriage right then and there. Seriously, that is. And marriage is the least of it. He was ready to propose a whole lot more.

And when she sat that mouth-watering feast down in her chair and turned her gaze on him again, she was somewhat shocked to see the whole catalog of perversions etched in this cop's face and there was something so ludicrous about it rather than get angry she almost broke up and it was all she could do not to laugh in his face. Eichord was badly shook up by her and he showed it, his face reddening as he introduced himself, “I'm investigating the murders here and since you, that is we'd heard you might be talking to, or that is, uh, you'd been talking with Mr. Hackabee with respect to the possibility—” He kept fumfering around and trying to breathe and think at the same time as he looked at her. Her eyes were so sexy. So hypnotically sexy. He'd never seen any woman quite like her before, even the time he'd worked on a case out in Southern California. Never.

He could not hear what he was saying to her. Only that a babble of words was coming out and that he was not saying to her what he wanted to say. His mind was totally off the case and the business at hand and he was WRECKED by the gorgeous looks of this woman and his immediate, instant, and panting desire for her. The humor of the situation had reached her.

And she was just sitting there watching him make an idiot out of himself as he said, “I was wondering since that's the case if it might not be, uh, possible to go out, and that we could, uh, you know, talk about the thing, the Hackabee situation, and, uh—"

The response was a blink of the eyes. A blink. One, single, enormous, feathery, loud, crashing, slapping, echoing blink of the long and beautiful lashes that protected her movie-star blues.

And he kept talking, “You know, I just thought that...” He trailed off. JEEEzus. What is WRONG with me? Have I gone insane? Have I pickled my damn brains? What is happening to me? He tried to shake himself out of it and he felt like he was so dry he could barely speak, so hot he could scarcely move, and the look of her had taken his breath away, hitting him HARD like a heavyweight's jab to the solar plexus, ooooof!

“I was hoping, uh, that we could, you know...” Yes—she knows what you were hoping, you lummox. She knows all too well what you were hoping. Are you a detective or a sex fiend? WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING? Did they bring you down to Dallas to work on an investigation or to get laid? He tried biting the inside of his lip and pinching his fingers: anything to take his mind off the single train of thought that was inexplicably and suddenly blocking out all images of crime and violence and murder and business and motive and the curious anomalies of the Hackabee case that had brought him out to meet the famous Noel Collier.

The pull had been instant. Chemical. Electrical. Mysterious. Explosive. Unmistakable. And completely one-sided. It was just one of those things. And that's with or without the fucking gossamer wings. Whatever makes things like this happen had Eichord in the palm of its hot wet hand and it was squeezing, slowly, relentlessly, inexorably, and Jack was loving it and letting it do whatever it wanted as long as he could be on the receiving end of it.

He knew about faces. On the surface this was as beautiful a face as he'd seen. Dazzling and heart-troubling beauty. WHAM! It is something you see and you swallow hard and try to recover from. About as close to a religious experience as erotica gets, especially when coupled with hot lust. But Eichord also knew a lot about what Camus calls "le face." About the masks that all of us wear. And he saw exactly what he wanted to see under this woman's perfect mask that was registering only a bemused and chilly disinterest. And so of course.... And so ... And so he asked her out. With no preamble. Not a hint of interest on her part. Never a situation that begged more for rejection, a cop and a famous defense lawyer—for one thing the adversarial position so strong as to professionally prohibit a relationship even if there'd been the basis for one—and he asks her out. He couldn't help himself. The devil made him do it. Whatever.

To her credit she did not say, “No, you jerk,” or “I don't even know you, you presumptuous, repulsive schmuck,” or any of the hundred other rejoinders he supplied for her when he ran the painful humiliation of his astonishingly incompetent and puerile confrontation with her through his mind over and over. But that would be much later. Amazingly, for the longest time, he would not admit the scene of rejection. He simply refused to let it exist. He asked her out and she had neither accepted nor refused.

He would not examine it the way it actually took place. He would not see that she had quickly smiled, almost a laugh, widened her glorious eyes, and just cocked that beautiful head to the side, an eyebrow curving up slightly as more smile lines crinkled, a rejection so absolute and devastating he could not recognize that it really happened. Because her turndown had been as unilaterally absolute as had been his turn-on. And much the same way he wouldn't allow himself to believe he'd been rejected, she wouldn't believe he'd had the balls to ask. Her body language was a point-blank, three-word, candid-gram: “Are ... you ... real?"