Frenzy (28 page)

She stood there unmoving. Absolutely rigid. Lancing him with her heat and beauty. Telling him that this — all of this — was his to take and use, and his brain overdosed on the fire that had spread through his body and he pulled her down.

Neither of them quite believed it. It was over so quickly for both of them and exploding out of them together in the thing that started as tenderness but crushing, demanding, consuming came together in a molten release that was so fast they just lay there together, Eichord still in her, she still clinging to him, both of them wet, soaked, sledgehammered, steamrollered, hung out to dry. And she said softly to him, "I want romance and I want it now," and he understood.

Later he sat on the edge of the bed beside her, with all the lights on, both of them nude, and he stared at all of her an inch or so at a time, just drinking her in and so obviously stoned on it she laughed and asked him, "Hey, buddy. Watcha starin' at?"

"Modigliani," he said, enraptured by the long curving throat and flawless upper chest.

"Never mind that Bo Diddley stuff," she said. "Let's screw." And he fell off the bed and laughed until he cried. And when he'd calmed down she got down on the floor with him and they did it on her bedroom rug. A first, she told him. And they agreed that America was a phenomenal place.

Eichord had been still for a long time. Listening to her deep breathing, and it startled him when she asked him, "You asleep?" in a quiet voice.

"No," he said softly.

"What were you thinking about?"

"Nothin'," he lied. Shaking his head and turning the corners of his mouth down. "Absolutely zero." Vowing that he would see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.

The old man sat quietly eating his dinner. It was not the standard prison fare. There was fresh fruit. Excellent fish. He tasted nothing. The frustration of it all was enough to make you go mad. He had to summon up all his willpower, which was considerable, to keep his patience. He was too old for all of this. What garbage the thing of theirs had become. He shook his head slightly and took another small bite of fruit.

He fumbled with his reading bifocals trying to get them out of the case which he dropped and ignored, not even watching as the large, frightening-looking man who stood behind him quickly and silently retrieved the case and placed it beside him, returning to his position to the old man's rear.

What had these boys become? Fucking Paulie and Jimmie. His goddamn brothers in the thing. Fighting each other and killing and breaking the oath right and left. You didn't kill someone where he lived. Not even if there was a contract. It just wasn't done. If you caught him with your daughter, maybe then you clip him near his home, but never like this. He tried to read about it in the summary.

He could do nothing. It hurt him to piss, it hurt him to shit, it hurt him not to shit. His old fingers were painfully arthritic and the first words he read set him off again. Jimmie the Hook. Crazy Lyle. Fucking maniacs shot at Toot Smith down in the middle of Laclede fucking Landing with people all over the fucking place. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, blessed Virgin, Holy Mother of God, what an I gonna do?

The Commission couldn't give less of a shit about the family's problems out in St. Louis. He was expected to run this thing from
JAIL?

He took a series of shallow breaths, his little bird chest wheezing, huffing, and puffing, ancient, abused lungs sucking air as best they could. Fucking prison air on top of everything else. Just more than a human being could stand. And the brotherhood expects me to pull this shit back together for them. He raised the first finger of his right hand a couple of inches from the table and felt the presence behind him moving and a looming shadow draw near at his command.

"Where's, uh —" Oh, Christ in His Heaven, now I can't think of his name. Finally it came to him. "Where's Duke? Is he in population?" His voice was thin and raspy.

"No, sir," the voice rumbled like gravel loose in a metal pan. "I 'tink Duke's down in Ad Seg."

The old man nodded. "Get him." And the large shadow moved.

A few minutes later there were footsteps and two men entered his room.

"Siddown," he said to the man after they gave each other the formal greeting of respect.

"Duke" — he slid the paper across the table — "I want the word out. Enough is enough. The next one who violates this thing of ours, the next — outlaw — that's it. He goes under. Give it to Big Mike Stricoti and Jack Nails. Tell them to get their own crew. Whoever it is. I want that shit clipped."

Spain sleeps. And in a sleep of death this man to whom control is so all important dreams that all control is lost.

A cloaked finger approaches from the shadows of the dream and a skeletal, clawed hand emerges from the folds of the dark cloak, tossing ancient bones from a skull cup.

The secret oracle gazes at the bones and foretells of sudden and violent occurrence.

Somewhere in the Orient a sage writes of myriad straw dogs, and high on a mountaintop an aged holy man pierces a veil of understanding.

A secret society prepares a virgin for ritual slaughter. Spain sees that it is his daughter.

A once-sentient mind now begins to recede into a dark, inner chamber where sense, impression, and response cannot penetrate. A bioelectrical circuit breaker is thrown. The chamber goes to black.

The dreamer lifts a hammered goblet that once held the blood of Christ, and drinks deeply of serpent venom. He sees the fissures of his brain transubstantiated into a nest of writhing eels.

The cold, inky force of the nightmare pulls him down, and two hundred fathoms below the surface he is held in a powerful, swirling whirlpool.

He dreams of giant sea snakes and mutant water scorpions and eyeless, slithering things that come to transfuse him again with devil-filth, and the oracle tells him he will return to the surface world to do murder by skill and magic. And he spirals up through the black, rushing helix at the command

"Expunge!"

The following day Spain rested. And the following night he made a totally random kill. Parking a stolen car out in front of the Robert Schindler Building across from the Press Club, a few blocks from police headquarters, walking in and looking at some names on a rubber nameplate thing by the elevator. And when the elevator man came over to him and asked him if he could help him, something in the man's tone, his pigmentation, sent Spain into a fury and without warning or a hint of premeditation (yet he had stolen a car), he pulled Mary Pat from her sheath taped to his left forearm and stabbed the diminutive elevator operator/doorman to death there in the lobby of the Schindler Building.

Back home and safely ensconced in the rental house he was busily remodeling to suit his bizarre and terrifying needs, he played with Pat, tossing the nine-inch stiletto into the soft wood of the table where it stuck again and again. He had read Leslie Charteris as a boy and remembered the dagger that The Saint had named after a woman — Anna, was it? And he named this deadly bitch after his wife and gave her blood to drink.

The stiletto stuck in the soft pine again, the cruciform silhouette casting its shadow along the tabletop. The appearance was exactly that of a crucifix, the shaft and guard making the sign of the cross, the grooves and relief work of the turned metal grip suggesting the crucified body of the Savior.

He took the thing and flung it with a vengeance across the room from him, hurling it by the point, throwing it with that practiced movement of the arm that he had developed over two decades throwing every type of knife — dagger, dirk, screwdriver, sharpened pencil, all manner of pointed and edged objects — and Pat bit into the wall with a comforting thwocking sound as the shadow of the cruciform fell against the wall, suggesting someone who had been crucified upside down and Spain set there staring at the stiletto in his wall, feeling a chill touch him there in the very warm, empty house. And Spain was now mad as a hatter. And he sat there quietly gritting his teeth, thinking about how good it was to stab the elevator operator whose tone of voice and coloration evoked the image of Gaetano Ciprioni. But he knew he would retain the professional control necessary to achieve his ultimate goal. That degree of controlled resolve would not desert him in his madness. Killing, after all, was what he did.

For three days Jack Eichord had been tied up with the flood of violence and then he had time to breathe and he called Rita.

"I've missed you desperately," she told him, and all he could do was breathe into the phone.

"I know, you've missed me too. I can tell by the way you're panting."

"Yeah," he told her very seriously.

"What is happening here?" she asked him.

"What?"

"What's happening to us?"

"What do you mean?"

"You know what I mean, you rascal you."

"Oh, you mean
that?"

"Yes. That."

"It's a biological phenom that I've read about in books. It's quite natural."

"Oh, that's good, then."

"It's very good, in fact."

"Does it have a name?"

"Yes, it thurtently doth," he said, sounding for some inane reason like a cat in the cartoons. "It means we're falling in sex."

"How romantic."

"Would you like a little romance tonight?"

"I could probably squeeze you into my busy schedule."

"Squeeze me about seven, say?"

"Consider yourself squeezed."

"I've missed you too. A lot."

Even better the second time? he asked himself afterward. No way. But it had been. So wonderful. They lay there laughing like fools, so pleased with each other and the nice discoveries. She fingered his second belly button, a puckered navel where an old wound had eventually smoothed over.

"You've led an interesting life, I see."

"Unquestionably, my dear Watson."

"What made this? Did someone bite you here?" She touched its indentation.

"Probably." He said as he felt the small groove that was a long, forgotten souvenir from a blocked Fairbairn thrust. "Ancient history."

"I feel sure it must be from a woman. A bite."

They sought each other's mouths and her tongue zapped him like the touch of a high-voltage line and he was copper winding down to a long, coiled grounding shaft that took the power hungrily and fed on it and he reached deeply to take as much of her hot, sweet lightning as he could, letting the energy of the electricity charge them in a crackling surge of current.

"Who is it?" Eichord said to Bud Leech, who was already on the crime scene.

"Little joker named Betters. They really played Hurt You with this boy. Hope you've had dinner already."

"Hey, Bud," one of the Homicide people said to Leech, nodding to Eichord.

"Yo."

"Can they take him?"

"Uh, hold it. Not yet, babe. Tell 'em hold it a few minutes."

"Okay."

"Small time jive-ass little punk named Vinnie Betters. Some gofer in with Measure." He shook his head. "I don't know what this is about," he said, jerking his thumb toward the kitchen on the word "this."

"You get done dusting yet?"

"Naw."

"Smells great in here."

"Jesus." Eichord put a handkerchief up to his face.

"Herrrrrrrre's Vinnie."

Eichord looked and turned away after a bit.

"Obviously whoever did this —"

"Yeah." He laughed without humor. "You could say that, all right."

"Seriously. Whatever the reason why he was killed, whoever did it was trying to get something out of their system. Nothing professional about that."

"I figure two, three, maybe four guys taking turns. Really getting themselves worked up. Nothing professional about it, as you say. Unless they were pros trying to tell somebody something — that your point?" 

"Right."

"Really did a J.-O.-B. on the little mother."

Vinnie was upside down, with maybe nine hundred puncture wounds in him, turning into maggot food under the kitchen counter there in his ex-wife's house.

"Who called it in?"

"His wife, er, uh, HEY!" He motioned to a detective. "Yo." He motioned for him to come over to the kitchen area.

"Tell him how you caught the call."

"Yeah. Well, it was his ex-wife. She said she'd just come in and found him. Claims she was shacked up with her latest old man in Atlantic City. We're checking it out. Vinnie's got a little yellow sheet. Little half-assed rat package."

"Maybe he ratted out the wrong dudes."

"Could be Rikla's people. I admit it don't look like no hit. Anyway, he was always trying to get made and didn't have the eggs for it, and — far as I ever heard — he just never had his shit together."

"He's got his shit together now." They laughed.

"F'r sure."

"Lynch Street people got here first. They called us. I came. You came. That's about the whole shot."

"Think they'll have anything on the street on this?"