Stone Shadow

Downtown Dallas and Highland Park

Eichord hated the telephone yet he recognized that it was one of the great tools in his profession, like the MCTF computers, and he made as much use of it as he could in spite of his loathing for the hunk of plastic. It was funny about “solving” homicides. You could cover the streets with a phalangeal army of detectives, bring in the feds and the technicians with their sophisticated gear, keep a half-dozen lab people up all night working with the most expensive equipment money could buy, and end up pulling the case out of the ashes with a hype who couldn't remember how old he was or by lucking out with that loathsome piece of plastic.

“I gotta pull my chestnuts outta the fire,” he said for no particular reason as Wally Michaels walked past his desk.

“Damn straight, sir. Nobody wants to burn their nuts.” I'll drink to that, Jack thought. And he got up and went in the men's room and took a big pull off the pocket flask he was now carrying with him. He shuddered it down, loving the way it burned inside him. In his pants pocket he'd taken to carrying a tiny tinfoil square with a bit of toothpaste in it. He opened the foil and put the toothpaste in his mouth, rinsing it around with tap water. He smiled at the thought of someone coming in and seeing him dab around in the little piece of Reynolds Wrap with his finger, see a bit of something white, and figure him for doing toot on the job. Same difference, he’ supposed, returning to the desk without a trace of guilt. That'll clear your fucking sinuses. He glanced at the stack of abstracts.

He was doodling an elaborate thing around the word “symbiosis” which was followed by the printed definition “the living together more or less intimate association or close union of two dissimilar organisms.” He capped his felt-tipped pen, reached over and dialed a familiar number.

“Public safety,” a bored woman's voice intoned.

“Police department, please,” Eichord said. He waited for a good sixty seconds while the ancient switchboard system rerouted his long-distance call.

“—lice department,” a male officer answered.

“Homicide, please.” Another long wait. He wondered how many times some poor slob being threatened, some wife about to be murdered, some terrorized kid, whatever, had phoned the police and waited two minutes to have the call put through.

“Homicide."

“Is James Lee there please?"

“Nope, this is Brown. C'n I help ya?

“Bob, Jack Eichord. Who's in the squad room?"

“Hey, Jack. Ummmm. Me, Herriman, Tuny, that's it. Where are ya?"

“Dallas. Put Tuny on, will ya?"

“CHUNKY!” he could hear him scream through the hand over the mouthpiece.

“Yeah."

“YEAH? What the hell kind of way is that to answer the phone?"

“Eichord?"

“In the flesh."

“You bum. Where the fuck are ya, fuckin’ Hawaii on the taxpayers’ buck?” “I wish. Big D. Hey, do me a favor. You know that phone book of Lee's that he keeps in his desk? The one with the loose pages with phone numbers in the back?"

“Unngg."

“Do me a favor, Dana. Look up Ozzie Barnes’ number and gimme the address too, if it's in there."

“Who?"

“last name: B-A-R-N-E-S. The first name will be listed as either Oz, O-Z, or Ozzie. Okay?"

“What, do I look like a fuckin’ telephone directory?"

“You look like somebody swallowed four basketballs, but how's about lookin’ it up anyway, big boy?"

“You got it, sahib, hang on to yourself.” A short pause and he heard fat Dana grab the phone again, “Kay, you got somethin’ to write with—a pencil or like that?"

“Yep."

“Okay get the lead out and write this down. Oz Barnes, Area Code eight-one-eight...” And he gave him the number, asked him if he'd drunk the Rio Grande or the Trinity or whatever caca river dry yet, and they exchanged a few insults and Eichord dialed again.

“Yeah."

“Ozzie?"

“Hey."

“Jack. Eichord.” “Oh, Jack. Nice surprise. Where are you?” He told him. “What can I do for ya?"

“Oz, this is kinda up your alley. Real far-out stuff.” He told him a little about the Grave-digger case. “I wondered if you had run across any weird stuff that might relate."

“In what way?"

“Oh, any of that goofy R-and-D shit the intelligence community is ranking out. Mind-control crap. LSD in the oatmeal. Any of that stuff?"

And for the next twelve minutes the Wiz of Ozzie took him through the whole nine yards of mushrooms and mind-blowers, peyote and pain generators, lasers and leutenizers, tone-harmonic phone numbers, and Mach 4 Finjets, helium-neon beams and stun batons and poison ring and the whole barren wasteland of horrors those CBW dickheads, were cooking up. Dick Calkins in his worst fucking nightmare never envisioned the dark truth of twentieth-century reality. High-tech hell.

And having learned nothing he thanked the Bionic One profusely and glanced at the doodle he'd made on autopilot while his mind freely associated:

1. A gun firing

2. A gluepond

3. 000, the Os interlinked.

And beside them, nothing. Not an image had been retained.

So by late afternoon Eichord was planted down the block from the Collier house in a different unmarked vehicle when Noel pulled into her driveway in the Rolls. In the seat beside him was a cooler full of ice and about three-quarters of a quart of black Jack Daniel's. If he was going to have to sit out here like an idiot he was going to do so with a modicum of the creature comforts.

He had the car radio and the scanner and two-way all on, and he sat there sipping from a coffeecup full of good cheer, listening to a surreal mix of dispatcher crosstalk and that ass-kissing save-the-last-dance-for-me music his favorite station played. It was kind of freaky sitting there in the gathering shadows, thinking about the case and about sexy Noel, listening to coppers respond to calls dispatched to the strains of “Stardust” and “Moonglow."

They had the confrontation about six-thirty, when a strange car pulled up behind Noel's and Eichord saw Joseph Hackabee get out and approach the house. He seemed to be expected and he was inside immediately, with Jack close behind and breathing hard.

“Yes?” She was startled to see him there when she opened to his insistent cop knock.

“You okay, Miss Collier?"

“Of course I'm okay. What in God's name?"

“May I come in?” he said, all but jamming a shoe in the door, feeling so suave and in control, and she didn't say yes or no but she stepped back, luckily, as he blundered through the door, tripping and going on his face but for the steadying arm of Noel's new protector, who said to him in a deep voice, “That was very deft,” as he saved him from falling, which only served to make it worse.

“Make yourself at home,” she told him icily as he barged past her. He could feel the booze warming him, pretty far along at that point.

“Mr. Hackabee,” Jack said somewhat expansively, “what's going on?"

The man had his arm in back of Noel proprietarily. “I don't think there's much point in offering you a drink, mmm?"

“I think he's already had a few,” she said, frowning. “Isn't that right, Mr.—uh, I'm sorry, I've forgotten your name."

“Eichord, MIZZ Collier,” he said to the room. It looked like a fucking, art museum. “Just checking to see how you're keeping.

“Uh huh.” She glared at him with eyes like dagger points.

Even whacked to the gills and falling-down drunk he could still admire her for what she was. The most beautiful woman he'd ever seen, in his life. The white dress was sufficiently décolleté that he looked up from it, back into the daggers, and she said, “I think you'd better leave. And if you bother us again,” she started talking about some kind of restraining-order deal.

He was fogged up so badly he couldn't think. The booze and his slick moves had left him paralyzed. He'd been unprepared and unprofessional. He could not remember a time before, even at the worst of his drinking problem when he'd had no idea what to do in the execution of his job. He just stood there looking at this untouchable, inaccessible object of his unrequited admiration and then at Hackabee, rich and elegant and unruffled and suave, standing in his own potent swirl of bourbon fumes trying to defog enough to know what to do next.

“Anything else? We're late for dinner."

“Guess not,” he mumbled, and forced himself to walk steadily as he shame facedly made his way out of the door and down the steps, negotiating his way carefully back to the car. He got in and turned all the radios off and just sat there, shivering a little for no particular reason. In a few minutes he saw them go out and get in Hackabee's rented car and he scrunched down a little hoping he wouldn't be seen.

But Hackabee began backing up until the cars were even and Noel had rolled down her passenger-side window and was saying something to him, a hostile look on her beautiful face. He rolled his window down.

“What?"

“I said we're going to the Mansion. It's on Turtle Creek. I don't advise you try to follow in your condition. You might want to radio for another surveillance car to pick us up when we leave there, but I don't suggest you do that. If I catch them watching I'll have you all surgically removed tomorrow and I promise you you won't like it."

“Hey, Eichord,” Joe Hackabee said, laughing openly and shaking his head as if he couldn't believe this idiotic drunk. “Spooky. REAL spooky.” And they drove off on that note, devoted defense counsel and grieving brother of the accused.

Somehow Jack made it back to the motel but he could not remember anything except a telephone conversation between the time he left the Collier house and the time he woke up, throat raw, stinking like a broken booze bottle, head pounding, shaking, disoriented, and for some reason frightened. No dog in sight. No wonder—he'd forgotten to set either food or water out. The dog was a survivor and he probably recognized a basket case when he saw one.

The worst of it was the fear and paranoia that seized him from the second he woke up. He shrugged it off, hoping against hope that he'd hallucinated the embarrassment at Noel Collier's house and that he hadn't really (sigh) phoned Donna Scannapieco in the middle of the night, drunk as a judge, totally wiped, calling up to ask for a date. No fucking mercy.

He went in and looked at the bleary-eyed mess staring back at him from the mirror and muttered an appropriate response to the looking glass. It summed up the tortuous, winding anfractuosity of his own neural pathway this morning. It summed up the entire Grave-digger case. It summed up the whole Dallas experience. An aphorism worthy of the world-class phrase-makers. Orwellian. Aristotelian.

“Shit, fuck. Piss on a duck,” he said.