Iceman (24 page)

Would he ever forget the sneer in that voice? “You don't know sweet shit, lady. Here are the rules: there are no rules. Okay? Now. You get one chance.” He did something quietly, soundlessly, but then there was a metal noise again, he restrained her back in the chair. “Will you admit you helped kill Diane Taluvera and others? No time. Talk. Yes or no?"

“You're crazy. You're fucking NUTS. I never killed anybody, you stupid son of—” The silver thing went off up close against her right temple. She had reached for the bullet with her right hand. There was some blood. Some noise. He looked around and picked up the brass.

Don't bog down. Keep moving. Don't worry about anything now, you've either got it covered or fuck it, you know? Everything gets dumped out of the sack and onto the sofa. Long white sofa, and godDAMN it get control of your hands, asshole. Get control of your asshole hands.

A Baggie inside the evidence bag. Three rounds. U.S..25 Colt Auto. Oldies but goodies. The silver thing a Frommer Lilliput. Exposed hammer. Not like the locked-breech weapons of the larger Frommers. Little Hungarian pocket guns that had some fuckup features like a hammer to catch on the way out and an exterior barrel casing that had a way of getting dented and totally screwing the weapon over. Some kind of crazy Rube Goldberg locking system. All in all, a piece of shit, but this little sweetheart was clean and cold. Freezer-cool and sheep-dipped as a piece can get. Never saw a cop's drop-gun case, never saw the inside of a Confiscated Property room. Right off a wise-guy stiff some five years back. Even the ammo was old, but it still made a bang. Bim-bam-boom.

And he finally fumbles the rounds out on the table beside Nicki's chair. Drops them and the spent casing into one of her pockets. Picks up a little lint on the oil. Does some things to the Lilliput. Runs an oily rag through a few times afterward. Puts a couple rounds in the mag. Takes the decedent's right hand and closes it around the grip. Mother-of-pearl. The left hand over the slide. Lets that hand drop. Cocked and unlocked. Stuffs it into the ballistics box and fires a second round. Picks up the brass and drops it into the sack. The noise is not a factor.

Rearranges the hands and feet. Nicki Dodd is looking good. Keep moving. No sweat. Looking real fine. Okay. We either got some time or we don't. He sees the legal pad in his head. Nicki had shown up with Schumway to the surveillance team working the four-to-twelve trick last night. He'd taken a chance and had Dana lift surveillance at midnight. The graveyard tour was thrilled, of course. Fucking house plants.

Prints. Powder—for the shooting team. Lint on the rounds. Nothing worse than rounds in a magazine somebody has wiped off. Angle of the dangle to match the heat of the meat. All by the numbers now. A weapon that's gonna look like it was fired once, and by the decedent, lead in the head, spent brass by her ass. Double-check—you got the second round in the box, the casing in the sack. So far so good.

There is no sense of being executioner or any of that superior, lofty, silly shit. No sense of right or wrong. We can sit down and worry later if this has bought us a ticket into hell, right? There's time or there isn't—so go to it. Eichord starts in the master bedroom and takes his time, working his way back downstairs to Nicki. She'll wait for him now. Yes, sir.

The only time problem is the timing problem. And that's no problem at all. Everything is under control. The arrest warrant gets served. The search warrant covers the entry. He'll be right there with the shooting team. What's not to love about it? Hell, there's a whole fucking WORLD not to love about this cluster fuck. But not now. Now is for looking. Prying into Mr. Spoda's dark world. Looking for icepicks and blood trails and creepy-crawlies.

The other box, in with the ballistics box in the sack, comes out, penetration of the cabinet again. Shit, I oughta get a key made, he thinks. He takes a better, moh puhfeck casting, brudder. This baby has to be el perfecto.

Finally, forty minutes later, he has run the whole nine yards. It's either done or it ain't. He opens his notebook and removes the paper. It appears to be a mimeographed or poorly photocopied “Miranda Versus” form. Two thick rubber bands hold it in place. But the Miranda ends under the second rubber band. He carefully unfolds what Nicki Dodd has signed and reads her brief suicide note. So-so.

Back at the typewriter, being extremely careful, hitting the keys slowly, one at a time, he types an identical note, leaving the message on the typewriter. He has debated putting a couple of neat, clear prints on the keys, but he has used an object that probably won't smear everything. Be funny if Schumway's prints would be clear and we can make HIM a suspect. Eichord smiles, but this isn't him smiling. Not now.

This is some other cat. Some rogue cop who is capable of taking the law into his own hands. This is a smiling murderer, baby. And fuck THAT, too. Sometimes the system fails.

Funny. He'd had an image register when they moved from the door. The rolling swagger so incongruous in a good-looking woman's walk. A tight end in drag. That Vegas hooker look, that's what she reminded him of. A Vegas casino hooker.

Think electric chair. Jack the Ripper Eichord, one-man firing squad. Jesus in heaven! At that second he felt as mad Saucy Jack must have felt, knowing your single contribution had been that of the razor's red kiss.

D
onna was talking about some pamphlets she wanted Jack to read about how to discipline a two-year-old, and he was not trying to tune her out, it was just that he couldn't shake the images from the day. Going back to the house with the evidence guys and the M.E. and the shooting team from Buckhead North had been as bad or worse than the awful scene this morning. Every step, every word of dialogue, was a land mine.

Somehow he'd gotten through it, but he couldn't shrug it all off. He kept worrying it like a cat with an addled mouse, shaking it, letting go for a moment, then jumping on it again. All things being equal, it fell together well. The surveillance team last night hadn't been yanked into thin air, they'd planted ‘em over at the Starlight Motor Inn, watching Mrs. Lauder. Then, with a dozen people still at the crime scene, working the house, Alan Schumway picked up for questioning, a totally bizarre thing happened.

The medical examiner had phoned the cop shop, who radioed the people on the scene. Eichord was told by one of the guys from North that the decedent was a man. He couldn't fucking believe it. Nobody could. It was going to cut their possible murder one suspect a hell of a lot of slack. Suddenly Nicki/Nicholas had begun to look like a sure-enough suicide. He/ she popped a cap into her head, with a note that said, “I'm sorry. I just can't take it anymore.” Signed, sealed, and delivered. A fucking transvestite blew his/ her brains out all over the living-room shag.

“She said they had a residual, no? I can't read my own notes, residential treatment center. And the funny thing was that a lot of these girls that come in there, you know, as battered wives, and it's incredible, a lot of them end up battering their own kids because—"

“Hey, Eichord,” fat Dana with the all-time grossest joke of the day.

“What?"

“You know why Alan and Nicki lived together?"

“Why?"

“Well, he couldn't walk, man. So he had to get a TV for his bedroom.” Screaming laughter. Fucking peabrain.

“—in the emergency foster home. So I told her about Jonathan and she said that it was perfectly natural for—"

What happens when he gets a card in the mail from Diane Taluvera. “Gee—sorry I didn't get back to you, but Bonnie said you were trying to get in touch...” Christ. A million things could collapse on him. He fought to lock in on what his wife was saying to him. She was looking at him intently so he nodded sagely.

“On the other hand,” he said, trying to look like a normal human being and not a fucking murdering FREAK, “you know the old saying."

“What's that?"

“Spare the rod and spoil the child."

I
t was Sunday and Donna had taken Jonathan to church with her. She tried to get Jack to go and he begged off. Work.

“It's Sunday, honey,” she said.

“I know."

“Do you have to work on Sunday?"

“No choice, Donna. Sorry,” he lied.

“We'll miss you. Won't we, my big boy?” He said nothing, dressed in his finery. Clean. “Won't we miss Daddy?"

“No,” the boy said loudly.

“There you are,” Eichord said.

“NO."

“Say YES. Jonathan. Say YES. Can you say YES?"

"NO!"

“Please?"

“No,” the child cooed pleasantly.

“Okay.” Donna turned to Jack. “Come with us?"

“Can't do it, babe.” He was afraid that everything showed in his voice. He had the doll house and the three dolls waiting for them for after church. He'd had them for days, but couldn't bring himself to do it. He couldn't wait any longer. They had to start trying to pull the little boy out of whatever darkness had hold of him.

Church had been a disaster for Donna. Jonathan had misbehaved, she told him, and she'd finally been forced to take him to the cry room, off the nursery, where a woman had entertained him until the services were over and Donna could reclaim him.

“Were you a bad boy in church?” Jack asked.

"NO! NO! NO! NO!"
Screaming at the top of his voice.

After he'd had some time to calm down, the three of them had a light lunch, and then Jack and Donna sat down on the floor with Jonathan and played dolls. This is Mommy and Daddy. They love each other very much. God gave them a little son. This is Jonathan. They loved Jonathan with all their hearts. They lived together in a house by the side of the road. And so on...

About five-forty-five Donna walked in front of the TV set in the family room where Jack sat vegetating in front of a football game. She was sobbing.

“What is it, angel?” He leaned forward, starting to stand up, and froze at the look of horror on her face as she showed him what she had in her hands.

“He-he brought them to me.” It was the Mommy and Daddy dolls. They were headless. Hey, things take time. No big deal. He's just a little boy.

He waited until about eight that night, and on the pretense of going out to pick up a magazine, he left the house and called Doug Geary long-distance from a payphone. He took him through the recent chain of events.

Dr. Geary said, “Jack, my friend, isn't it possible you've blown these things out of proportion? Two-year-olds don't take photographs out of picture frames. Their hand-to-eye coordination wouldn't allow it. Don't you think you may be reading into the—"

“Doc, it wasn't like that. He pulled that picture down and the glass broke. It never did fit in the frame right anyway, and when it hit the floor, the picture fell out. But he reached a little hand into that pile of glass and got the photograph. I saw him tear it. I saw his eyes."

“He'll grow out of it. Jack. They all do."

“He tore the HEADS off the dolls that represented us. He HATES us."

“Listen, it's perfectly natural.” He spent ten more minutes doing his best to reassure Jack Eichord that two-year-old Jonathan was going to be all right. It would work out. The kid wasn't a latent psycopath, after all. Everything would work out.

Finally Jack rang off with self-deprecating apologies, some laughter, and profuse thanks. But he wasn't smiling when the line went dead. Inside him there was something worse than any horror he'd ever known. A gnawing thing that he was afraid was chewing out a permanent place in his guts. He had lived to see one of his worst fears realized: finding himself having to constantly fight his own thought processes, the one horror you can never escape. Thought cancer.

Driving back home under the painful weight of it, he could understand that he was working overtime to throw off verboten thoughts, fighting to shake loose of them like someone throwing off piles of extra covers on a hot summer night, only to awake the next morning drenched in sweat and covered in the same blankets.

And in the morning Eichord woke up petrified with the fearful leftover vision from his night dreams: the official form with the space marked accident—suicide-homicide. The one he'd dreamed was marked cause of death—deferred.

O
ne 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.