Frenzy (25 page)

"El Paso, baby. I need thirty-four beans. Cash American or I take my merch elsewhere. That's the deal."

"I'll go twenty-seven-fifty absolute tops. An' you throw in a couple hundred rounds of ammo."

Laughter.

"Listen, I really enjoyed it, hey. But I got to go do some things. Seriously. You want 'em at 3400 or no? Say the truth, now. I got to book."

"What about the ammo? I don't gotta buy the fuckin' ammo too, do I?"

"'Course you do, baby. I don't get that shit free either, dig?"

"Hey. Fuck it. I'll shop around, ya know." The car door.

"Listen. Gimme thirty-four hundred, I'll toss in four boxes of parabellum."

"Four what?"

"Four boxes of nine-mm. That's it. Thirty-four beans cash now."

"Awright. Fuck it." Pause.

"One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten . . . . "

Spain had started to squeeze the trigger and the light popped on in the car as the door opened and his man got out. He had an M-31 loaded in the tube. He'd built it himself from a practice rifle grenade, one of the demilled jobs with the fuse and explosives out and with the copper cone where the shaped charge goes intact. Fins in real good shape. He squeezed as the man ducked back in the window and the man was leaning in and counting, "Eight, nine, ten, two thousand, and one, two, three, four," peeling off hundreds when the shaped charge exploded against the side of the car. He heard the coughing plop when the charge exploded out toward him, but by the time his mind had registered the sound and he'd paused long enough to look over toward the trees his head and upper torso had turned to red, disintegrating Alpo; the driver and the car and the sack of "Lugers" and the rest of him were all blown to scarlet shit in a flaming orange ball of fiery, explosive death.

Spain turned and began moving back through the trees, climbing back up through the tall grass toward the highway. He glanced back once at the inferno burning down on the road, the billowing, black, oily smoke a strong chemical smell. The Mercedes was still intact but the flame should ignite the tank soon, and he spat once and turned back breathing deeply of the fumes and the mixture of gasoline aromas wafting from the wake of the passing traffic. He got in and started the engine, listening for the blast as he pulled out onto the highway.

Bud Leech and Eichord were on their way to knock on a couple of late doors when Leech rogered a call on the two-way.

"Eighty-one-eleven," he told the dispatcher, which was the numerical designation for the Intel unit.

The radio voice gave him the word and they were on the way to the crime scene in a hail of static and incomprehensible copspeak. Eichord recognized "forty-three-oh-four," a number of the Homicide Bureau, and "Castle Road," and that was about it. They were northbound, moving fast in a marked scout unit, Eichord having to concentrate to follow the twists and turns and then giving up and relaxing as they sped through the nighttime traffic.

"I have no idea where we are."

"Know which district you're in?"

"I'm not even sure what state I'm in."

Leech smiled and said, "Just remember the high numbers are the districts north of St. Louis, north of town that is, and —" The radio interrupted. He exchanged another brief bit of cryptic copspeak and told Eichord, "It's a car bombing." Another homicide or two in the growing file that was called "Russo" after the hood whose murder had precipitated the gang war.

Bud Leech worked the field. He was technically an intelligence supervisor but he'd come from a smalltown background where you did it all; you secured a crime scene all by your lonesome, took the pictures, gathered the evidence, came back and wrote it up, investigated, you were a one-man team. Now he was a watcher. He watched the religious cultists, the dudes with the paramilitary club who got off on mere fantasies, all kinds of things beside what feel under the usual "organized crime" provinces of gambling, pros, extortion, loan-sharking, porn, and of course, the biggie narcotics.

"What is your procedure as to who rolls on a homicide call," Eichord asked as the scout car shot through the cars in the fast lane.

"How do you mean?"

"In terms of whether or not you hear about it?"

"Oh, I'm gonna hear about it all right. But you mean if the dispatcher calls us."

"Yeah."

"Anytime a call comes in to the dispatcher for homicide to respond — let's say to a fatal shooting — the first individual on the crime scene automatically calls for an ambulance, and if the victim appears to be dead four people automatically get the call. Five now with you. You got homicide, you got the medical examiner, you got the ET unit, and us."

"ET unit?"

"That's the mobile van. Evidence technician. So we've got a fairly well-preserved and -documented crime scene in many instances. The ET guys are right there with all the tools ready to have at it."

"Would there be exceptions in fatalities? Like where you'd never get called in?"

"Oh, sure. Like a traffic fatality. Something of that nature, sure."

"No. I mean, say they find some dude hanging from a rope in a fleabag hotel. Suicide note pinned to his chest and he's swinging from the light fixture. You gonna be there on the scene?"

"No. Probably not in that case. No."

"No."

The perpetrator or perps unknown had been very lucky, Leech and Eichord learned upon arriving at the crime scene. The lieutenant was already there and Springer told them, "At least two dead. Bodies absolutely blown to shit. May be a third one dead. One in that vehicle" — he points in the direction of some charred and smoking rubble, and then at the wreckage of a car on its side in the nearby field — "and there's some human remains over by that one." He glances at some notes. "Eighty-eight Mercedes registered to one Anthony Tripotra, a.k.a Tony Trip. Muscle in the Dagatina family. No way to tell on this other one."

"The guys that did this got lucky as hell. There's nobody home in any of the farmhouses and homes on down this way. And all the good citizens that heard the explosion goin' by up on the highway, all the smoke'n' shit, nobody called it in to us. We wouldn't be here if Fire hadn't caught a call on it."

"Hey! Lieutenant" — a uniformed officer and two detectives were over by the edge of the road poking around in the bushes and trees — "over here." One of the homicide cops, a detective named Richard Glass, was holding up a shell casing of some kind in an evidence bag. The smell was offensive beyond belief as the smoke wafted toward them.

"All the earmarks of a pro whack-out."

"Right." Eichord looked at the contents of the bag. A technician was walking down the road with a weapon he'd found somewhere. It looked like what was left of a Walther P-38.

After several minutes of poking around, Leech and Eichord looked at each other and shrugged simultaneously, heading back to the scout unit.

"You've seen enough?" Leech asked.

"Yep."

"You didn't say much back there," Leech said as they got in the car. " I figured we'd see some real criminology goin' down but you just kinda poked around and stuff. I was pretty disappointed." He was grinning.

"Yeah. Well, it was an off day." They drove back toward the city. "You didn't say much either there, by the way. Real quiet."

"That's my thing, Jack. I don't do much. I just lay back in the weeds real cool."

"Um hmm."

"Check it out."

"See who the bad players are."

"Gotcha." Traditionally cars that roll on a homicide call the findings back to a district supervisor who would arrive and take charge of securing the scene. He would be maybe a detective sergeant but he would remain in charge no matter what kind of rank showed up subsequently. If the criteria met the right guidelines, then Eichord would eventually get a call. He wanted to make sure it was going to happen.

"What are the rulebook criteria for who gets called on a firebombing or any homicide of this nature?"

"Well. First .... somebody's gotta be fairly dead."

"Good. I agree, of corpse."

"Jesus. All right, I quit. Okay. It would like depend on case saturation. The call depends on that day's work load more than anything. But you can stop worrying. It happens now. Everybody knows. Jack Eichord gets in on the act first thing."

Bud Leech was the first cop he'd met in St. Louis other than Springer who'd been willing to give him shit all about anything. He looked over at the man. He had a hypognathous jaw and a large, broken beak that gave him almost a Dick Tracy look. All it would take was a less towering physique, and Leech could put on a snap-brim and a yellow trench coat and pass for the Gould comic strip hero. Eichord said:

"Give me a crime stopper."

"Huh?"

"You know, a Dick Tracy crime stopper. Something I can use in the investigation."

"Okay. If you want to take notes, it's fine. You ready?" Eichord grunted he was. "Don't step on your dick. That's a crime stopper!"

"Hell. There's
no
chance of that."

On the way back in, Leech told him about the special Intel unit. The functions had ranged from dignitary protection to maintaining an active watch file on the organized-crime dudes. Sometimes it worked as an independent unit. At other times it coordinated with state, county, or federal agencies, task forces like McTuff, DEA; it was big with the narcs. Their byword was informants. IRS, Leech called it: Informants, Research, and Surveillance.

Eichord knew all about informants. They became friends. Even though you never wanted to "go to bed" with them figuratively or any other way, you ended up doing it. There was a strong, undeniable bonding pattern that develops over the years between a cop and a snitch. Even the worst degenerate junkie is a human being just like you are. And if that person gives you important information and helps you make cases of any consequence, it is difficult not to look for their redeeming qualities.

They talked about it and Leech said, "I've got people I've been close to for nine, ten, eleven years. They don't owe me and I certainly don't owe them but they still give me good shit. Maybe nine, ten years back they got jammed up some way. Arrested, waiting trial, or trying to get clear of something, and that was how we got hold originally, but now there's nothing hanging over them and still they give. Same with you?"

"Yeah. Absolutely. And they do become friends."

"Right. Somebody helps you and it's just the nature of the relationship. If you're human, pretty soon you feel very friendly for them. It's weird."

"Love is strange."

"I remember that one, too. Mickey and Sylvia?"

"Chee-rist. You're even older than you look."

"I'm bigger than I look, too. So watch it, pal."

"You can't be bigger than you look, Godzilla. You look big enough to hunt geese with a rake." That broke him up.

"That's the second time I heard that one," he said, shaking his head.

"Only the second time?"

"Yeah. The first time I was nine years old."

Every crime scene Eichord remembered you'd get hit with a little shot from the sudden-death thing. It didn't matter how many times you saw it, even the most crusty, hardened ME felt something at the bad ones, some sense of waste, some nicker of remorse at the loss, or perhaps it would come on them slowly, layering its cumulative effect in a tiredness, manifesting itself in world-weary humor or black, low comedy. Anything to get you through it.

Eichord had seen the bad ones. The kids. The pets. The old folks. Whole families. Mass graves. Torture scenes that made paintings of hell look like Wyeth landscapes. There were some he'd never completely shake loose from.

Rolling through the night traffic they passed a place where the highway had been blasted through some boulders and on a rock about the size of Providence, Rhode Island, some moron had left a bit of late-twentieth-century wit and wisdom. There across the huge boulder, fading in the sunny passage of time, crudely spray-painted in shaky letters is the legend,

DEBBIE SUX

The lost generation. The beat generation. The megeneration. The hightech generation. And now, the Debbie Sux generation. Fucking words to live by.

Some future archeologists from the planet Garbanza X will have a time trying to decode some of
our
more primitive hieroglyphics. Jack Eichord thought to himself that he'd like to be there when the Exalted Chief Expositor of the Eleusinian Mysteries is called in to translate the profound meaning of "Debbie Sux."

John-boy was not so easy. He didn't drive a bright-yellow Volkswagen with vanity plates reading SOLDIER. But professional or not, Johnny Picciotti would go down like a stone. Easy and greasy.

He lived in an apartment hotel — didn't any of these assholes own a fucking home? — But, no problem. Spain used a man he'd farmed a couple of jobs out to in the past. Told him to be in front of the place at a certain time. To wait. A woman would tell him when he could go up.

Spain was across the street in another vehicle watching his worker as he talked to Greta about some mythical duties she would be fulfilling in the future, but both watching his watcher and waiting for Picciotti, whom he'd nailed to a fairly regular schedule. Johnny usually left for Blue Kriegal's place about a quarter to ten every morning. He was on time this morning.