Stone Shadow (12 page)

Wrapped very tight, Jack can see him starting to really shake.

“He showed me a dude in Plano. He followed him and zapped him and takes him to this ditch.” And he began telling Eichord and the monitoring eyes and ears how to find a new, watery grave in Plano, Texas. “Oh, shit, man, there's other dead people in there."

“Where?” Softly, a trickle of fear sweat chilling on him.

“In the WATER. He showed me under the water. These big trees right by the bank and you drive over this steep levee and right at the bottom of the blacktop part it turns to a gravel run and the road goes right. There's hardly any ditch bank at all. Looks like maybe four or five feet and the water is up real high near the road. It's a kind of bayou thing back along in there just as you come over the levee. And stop right there by the clump of tall trees and shit."

“Old dude in there already. Looked to be about seventy-five, eighty, shit I dunno how old, but he's been in the water for a while. And there's a big chain around him and he's bloated up and shit. And see, he's chained to these tree roots and"—he sniffles—"there's others chained up, another guy wired down in there and they're all kind of anchored in there together."

“Who is the killer, Ukie?"

“I don't fucking KNOW I SWEAR TO GOD I ... Oh, man, I don't know. I'll take a lie detector. Anything. Shit. I don't know.” He sobbed again and Eichord just sat there watching him blubber. Tears running down the face, down the Cary Grant chin.

“He never lets himself be seen. He stays back. In the shadows.” Ukie's body shook with an involuntary shudder. “You can see he's tall from the shadows. Tall like a professional basketball nigger. He likes to hurt me. He feeds on the pain. Takes reassurance from that feeling of awesome an deadly and terrorizing power the POWER you can't believe the power that he has to intrude upon your mind anytime he wants to and he gets right into the middle of your thoughts and you have no control of what you have in your head all of a sudden and, oh, my Christ, don't ask me.” Sobs and shaking spasms again but on his own snapping right out of it, wanting to spit the words out, “Don't ask me to explain who he is instead let me try to tell you what I'm not. Don't you know I've played this out in my head a hundred times acting out how I'd tell the cops when it was time and how I'd make fools of everybody oh Jesus sweet Jesus in heaven please don't let me die for the stupidity of what I've done I never meant to hurt anybody you can ask even that bitch Donna the most I ever did maybe twist the cunt's hair a little and make her dog-fuck me and shit she
LIKED
THAT it wasn't—a few slaps—I never hurt anybody—I'm no KILLER please please I didn't—"

“Okay, now.” Eichord sat back down. “Describe what you see on the, uh, pathway in your head."

“It's not the pathway in my head, man, you make it sound like I'm lying or some jive shit about a yellow brick road this is a fucking REAL PATHWAY it's a level of communication where he can REACH me. He takes me there instantly. What I see? I see the gray stone. The beads of moisture on the walls. I have to piss bad. I take a leak. I splash around. I want old Sly back in my pants before he comes along but see you always have a warning, not right before. He likes to surprise you but you know within a few minutes because you feel so ... dirty."

“Let me make sure I comprehend all this. You're saying you don't know who he is. But it's a man who stands in the shadows. But you can tell he's tall. He feeds on pain. And after he hurts you for a while he shows you where bodies of victims are buried. Is that pretty much it?"

“Yeah.” Subdued now.

“How does he hurt you?"

“In my mind somehow. I dunno. It's like he pulls the pain out of you. It's terrible. You think you're gonna die."

“I'm sure. Hey, listen, Ukie, what am I going to tell you. It's the Way of the Viper all over again. It's every bad horror movie cliché. It's some kid writers out in Hollyweird. They snorted too much blow and they're gonna write about this dude who clouds men's minds. But they'll call him Lamont Cranberry so we don't know they stole it from The Shadow. It's just crap, Ukie. Nobody's going to buy it. Nobody's going to buy it as a foundation for a nutsy number either.” Eichord shook his head and smiled. They just looked at each other.

“No, man,” Ukie whispered. “No. NOOOOOOOOOOO, this is no goddamn shuck I'm not nuts why would I try to—look, you already told me no no man, please, I don't—he takes me with the power of his mind,” crying now softly.

“On a secret neural pathway?"

“Yes."

Eichord sat unmoving. Watching. “Uh huh."

“You wouldn't be so fucking smug if you'd seen some of the ones he put down. This bitch with her whatchacallit carotid artery fucking severed and stuffed in this thing and one you still haven't found on top of a computer center and the ones he's thrown off of buildings and shit.” Lots of tears now.

Eichord couldn't resist. “I gotta ask you one more question, Ukie."

Hackabee took a deep breath and waited.

“Does this have anything at all to do with the katachthonian subworld's revenge?” he asked innocently. When Jack closed the door Ukie's parting “FUCK YOU” was still echoing from the institutional walls.

Either way he was going out the door and heading for the nearest bar. I'll fix this shit, he thought, licking his lips at the thought of the liquid remedy.

A
nother day another time with the vibes a little different he wouldn't have been back behind a desk doodling in the middle of the afternoon. He'd have been out at the house waiting for the evidence techs to finish but he'd come back to the cop shop half-blitzed and he just wasn't up for it. It was something he wanted to do alone the first time, go in the house where Spooky Ukie, which is what he thought of him now, had taken Donna and kept her chained like an animal. Using her for sex. Showing her dirty pictures and dirtier news stories. It always broke him up how they ran sex and violence together—the media people and the morally outraged. They shouldn't be tied together at all. Nothing more pornographic than some front pages and TV newscasts. Nothing more obscene than raw violence.

He was doodling, half in the bag, drawing guns and glue bottles and trees and doors and beehives. He was doing his free-association doodle which he used to remember conversations. Eichord was not the believer in electronic gadgetry that so many of the younger cops were today. He seldom went into a situation wired. He liked to keep everything as organic as possible. Even now, waiting to shake off his half-bagged stupor before he viewed the videocassette again, he thought how little he cared for the new technologies. The computers, that was a little different. But he knew about masks and how easily the very clever and sociopathic perpetrator could fool you.

The biggest lie imaginable, right up there with “The check is in the mail” and “I promise not to cum in your mouth” was, “You can't fool the camera lens.” Bull. You could fool the living SHIT out of the camera lens, the microphone, the polygraph. There were in fact whole books on the subject and the books weren't really all that valuable either. When you were combining the uniqueness of people and the mechanical and programmable elements of high technology you ended up with a quasi-art form if not an enormously imperfect science. Even in his bagged fog he could envision himself watching Ukie say, “I never touched a hair on their fucking
HEADS."
Knowing that the combination of fear, malevolence, and sincere pleading he'd felt in the room and seen in the eyes would be flattened and distorted by the video surveillance tape.

He thought about what he was going to do as he doodled. He'd go out to the old dark house alone. A part of him couldn't help but momentarily wallow in the what Lee Marvin once referred to as “the vicaries,” even more of a buzz to the guys out there in the trenches, because they knew what it was to walk along the edge of the precipice. He would go in alone, his concentration on full beam, but subconsciously programmed by four decades of life that included
The Bat Whispers,
and all those sliding-bookcase movies of the 1930s and ‘40s.

He'd be touching ordinary wood but he'd be programmed for ornate wainscoting and spiral staircases, sniffing the traces of fear and Jade East and his own Caswell & Massey, but knowing the air was electric with voltage from
The Lost City
and every mad scientist's sparking tesla coils. He'd be brushing against surfaces covered with dirt but these were the hands that gripped the armrests of the Orpheum as the skeleton reached out and touched Mantan Moreland. He knew the truth. No matter what he found, a part of him would be getting off on it. His comic book was getting more and more real. Any day now he'd find himself starting his own cigar box of press clippings.

He thought what he'd do, his wandering mind staggering all over the place as he doodled away: he'd get his shit together and go watch the latest couple of Ukie tapes. See if he could feel any splinters on the banister. Look for the big paw prints in the container of Dairy Farm.

Tomorrow maybe he'd check out the house when nobody was there. He wanted to go back with Donna Scannapieco. See what might shake loose when she saw the place where Hackabee had kept her and put her through the weeks of slavery and horror. What would she think when she saw the awful place where she'd been repeatedly assaulted? What would anybody think?

When the awful anger welled up would anything else float to the top? Would she see something that triggered a forgotten terror, a clue to the odd and oddly impenetrable man who claimed to be “the world's greatest mass murderer” and then recanted? Who was six feet one or two of good-looking guy yet had to wag his wiener at strangers or kidnap and force a victim to get up for it. Would she be able to point Eichord onto the trail of anything that might lead to a clear picture of this character? Was there even a remote chance that he'd seen those bodies buried the way he claimed?

Among other calls made were those to a clinical psych he'd worked with before, currently in Boston, to somebody in Prescott, Arizona, to the MCTF chain of command for access to an on-line terminal. This and that. He thought about calling Donna Scannapieco and asking her about a point they'd missed in her latest debriefing, but he let it go.

He looked at the legal page covered in doodles: a large number one. A picture of a gun. The gun shooting a target with the word “FLIPPO” printed in the bull's-eye.

Two ... A drawing of a glue bottle spilling out a lake of glue and a HAMMONTREE growing out of the glue pond.

He could run nearly sixty numbers and names through his mental data processor that way, and the association would stay with him for as long as he needed it. Each of the symbols was a memory key and he preferred this to working with a recorder and mike, which he would sometimes use in a vehicle, but they came in handy at other times. Not just doodles or games or free association.

They were for those moments when he was analyzing the cadences or the silences of a conversation, the times when the trivia and the subtle changes and the nuances were nudging him. This is the way he'd school himself to remember the “throwaways.” The images would stick.

Three ... Idly, he doodled three interlinked Os.

This time he crumpled the doodle into a ball and round-filed it, tried to make a couple of more calls, and then went in to watch the Ukie tapes over again. He saw nothing. Just a frustrated, strange man doing his thing. It told him nothing. When he heard Ukie say the “neural pathway” nothing signaled him. No neon signs lit up for him. No light bulb came on above Ukie's cartoon head. It was just a waste of time. He felt drowsy. Boozy. Old. He was hungry. He said, “Chuck it, fuck,” and left. Nobody knew he was gone and nobody would have cared if they'd known.

Out by the Lido he went in this place and bought a small smoked ham, a fresh loaf of pumpernickel that smelled so good he wanted to eat it right there, and a jar of sweet mustard that cost nearly three dollars. He couldn't believe it. He asked the clerk to make sure and she double-checked and by God that was how much it cost. He'd been wanting some of it since Chink and Chunk had hipped him to it. It was made someplace called Wolf Island, Missouri, and he'd been told, “Once you try it you'll kill for it."

He put money in a pay phone and started to dial Jones-Seleska on a whim and checked himself. He just couldn't handle one more rejection. He went into his motel room, threw his sport coat over a chair, and took his knife and cut a slice of the ham about an inch thick. He spread pumpernickel with the Wolf Island mustard and took such a huge bite he nearly bit into his thumb. He hadn't realized how hungry he was till he had taken the food back to the loaner and when he got into the car with that fresh pumpernickel smell he noticed he was salivating like a madman. He swallowed and hurried. This had been worth it, definitely. Oh, yeah. This WAS three-dollar mustard. He couldn't remember a ham sandwich ever tasting so good. He sat there drinking a semicold Michelob and eating ham and fantasizing about Noel's pad. He was sitting on a motel bed with his sock feet up on a nineteen-dollar sling chair. Boy. I guess they know how to live—them rich folks.

Funny thing about all that is, he thought, no matter if you go to Neiman's for the clothes, and you go to Gucci's for the leather, and send to France for the china, and you don't have to worry whether you can afford three-dollar mustard or not, and you have a fridge full of dreamripened manzanilla olives ... hey, even if you've got five hundred dollars’ worth of beluga on the side, a ham sandwhich still is pretty much just a ham sandwich. Why sell your life down the tubes for it? You still gotta pull on the pants one leg at a time. You still get into traffic snarls whether you're sniffing leather in a Rolls or vinyl inside a Ford. Like a friend of his was fond of saying, “End's what counts, baby, and in the end it all comes out dead."

He took some trash out later because he didn't want it stinking up the room overnight, and out by the dumpster he saw a hungry, collarless dog of indeterminate breed sitting there. It cocked its head warily at Eichord, who said, “Hey, boy, come here.” He squatted down but the dog didn't budge. “Come here, buddy. I won't hurt you."