Slice (17 page)

You know how it is when you get hit real hard with a chain? Well, what happens is—nothing. See you don't feel anything right away but the impact of the blow just numbs you out. It's later, that second or two or ten seconds later when the feeling starts coming back that you start screaming and holding yourself and shitting all over your new $375 cowboy boots from the intensity and blinding shock of the unendurable agony because as you well know there is nothing quite like being hit by 21/[2] feet of taped tractor chain. It will flat out put your raggedy country-and-western ass in the big hurt locker. It was a good thing he died real soon thereafter as it spared him a lot of terrible pain.

Shows you there's a good side to almost everything.

It just ain't reasonable to expect you can two-step through life without kickin’ a little cow flop from time to time. It ain't nothin’ personal, it's just the way of the world. Once in a while you're gonna get them size 11 Justin Full Quill Ostrich jobs (regularly $495, special at Hubbard Western Wear only $375!), in the doo-doo. Life is not blue skies all the time. You got to be a philosopher about the thing. Into every life a little chain must fall.

“
A
. C. Wiegrath, please,” the voice tells the woman over the telephone.

“May I tell him who's calling, please?"

“SAC Krug at the Bureau."

“Oh—yes, sir—just a moment, please.” The line goes click and there is a momentary pause and he hears the familiar voice answer.

“'Morning, Howard."

“Arthur."

“You get a chance to go to school on my memo?"

“Yeah, I did. I pretty much think we need to push on with this. I see what you're saying but we're getting boxed in with the investigation if we don't move."

“Well"—the man's raised eyebrows and shrug could be heard over the telephone in his tone and the sigh—"you know the sit-chee-ashun as well as I do. You're on eggshells. Something like this. I think you have to do what you think best. Buck stops with you."

“Yeah. Well, we got only three possibilities. First Mr. Fields hisself, which doesn't make much sense—guy can buy anything he wants now—Christ, djew look at his financial statement?"

“No, I didn't. He's got a few?"

“Yeah, you could say that.” They chuckled. “For a rainy day. You can say the boy Monroe put it in a cigar box and buried it. I guess we can't dismiss it."

“What'd the poly do?"

“Shit,” he said contemptuously.

“I figured."

“We took about forty man-hours combined with that damn videotape. He looks awful good for it. He's in there in a shot one minute, he's outta the shot the next minute."

“Christ almighty, I think...” He trailed off.

“Arthur, if there was ANYbody else looked ripe for it I wouldn't press it. I mean the girl. Shit there's no way. Just no opportunity. The video narrows it down by eliminating everybody else including the two uniform guys. I think we're lookin’ at Fields, John Monroe, and the investigating officer in charge. That's it."

“Detective Sergeant James Lee out of Buckhead Station."

“Yeah.” Long pause.

“I think we got to get a court order and the whole shootin’ match."

“Lee's telephone. Fields’ telephone. What else?"

“All the usual. For now. Then we'll just wait and see what drops out of the trees, I guess."

“Jesus. You know, for a measly damn twelve, insured at that, you know what
I'd
like to do with this one."

“Hey, really. Amen to that. It just don't work that way."

“I know, I know. Okay. I'll put it in the works."

“Thanks, Arthur."

“No problem. Get back to you after a while."

“Right,” Special Agent-in-Charge Krug said, hanging up the phone.

The man sitting on the other side of the desk from him anticipated what Krug was about to say and said, “I can appreciate how he feels. We don't like it much either."

“Right."

“But we both know we got a dirty cop here."

“Looks that way, I'll admit."

“Yep."

H
e had always counted on his surprising quickness and it had never failed him. He was amazingly surefooted until he grew tired, and his unexpected speed and agility had surprised more than one adversary to death. Daniel had always been careful about revealing his secret quickness of movement, even in combat, and he regarded it as a special, delicious treasure quite rightfully.

But while he could sprint fifty, sixty, seventy-five feet with dazzling speed for his obvious corpulence he was then dead in the water. Running more than a few city blocks, even at a slow jog, was impossible and to him unthinkable. What would be the point? Stamina has its limits.

He knew himself the way you know a reliable machine, every tolerance, every interrelated movement within the system, and his capacities and limitations were known, calculated, and trusted. First his wind would give out, then if he kept going—his ankle would pain him—and soon he'd be moving like a wounded hippo, favoring the bad ankle and moving in a kind of half-lurching half-waddling plunge forward, almost out of control, and uncharacteristically vulnerable as he gulped in mighty lungfuls of air. It was worse than if he'd remained in place and fought, or hid, or whatever. So of course he never ran.

Now he had to run. He had to do it all—the whole aching, killing, hurt-filled, boring, lonely, frustrating, play-through-the-pain program designed to tire him to the point where he wouldn't eat. To make him sleep on a huge, screamingly hungry gut that demanded attention as it shrunk. What was his speed? Could he run the forty in 4.4? The hundred in 14.4? He hadn't a remote clue. He decided not to buy a stopwatch, as he could count up to sixty minutes by the second and not be more than four seconds off either way. Hell, he WAS a clock.

So he bit the bullet and did it. He'd pull off his huge shirt and, Ace bandage carefully wrapped around the right ankle, take off at a quick double-time toward the nearest ditch. At first he could only run one way—but slowly, day by day, he'd run a little farther before he gave out, exhausted, collapsing in a wheezing, beached-whale heap wherever he fell, gasping for air, his ankle throbbing with pain to which he would steel himself. His heart would be threatening to burst through the enormous, meaty-tittied chest, and he'd be angrier, at that moment, then he could ever remember being when the hot and red waves of kill fury were not present.

Finally he'd manage to get back to his feet, and—still fighting for air—he would gamely walk back to the shack, the soaked towel in his huge hands. It was then, on each of the trips back from the edge of Hora's property line, he would take the soaked bath towel and wring it. Jesus Christ wring it dry and then the hands would grip it like it was a human throat and they would wind the towel tighter and tighter, testing the strength of those mighty, powerful shoulders, back muscles, neck, upper arms, forearms, wrists, and killer hands as he pulled at the towel ripping the jawbone of a man loose or tearing the head from a woman or spear-thrusting into the solar plexus and coming up under the rib cage and forcing the fingers under the lower ribs and pulling with all his might. Do you know what power it takes to pull a human rib cage apart you spineless, pencil-necks in your safe, happy worlds of calm and poise and freedom? Do you know the will the concentration required to force the thumbs in behind the eyes and pop them out like so do you know the force it takes to rip a heart out with your hands?

Oh, he hated them all so. Hated their smiling faces and their foolish, sheep ways and their lives that seemed to mock him just by their mere existence.

Sissy knew instinctively that she must communicate something to this quiet and excitingly dangerous new man in her life. She wanted him to understand that his violent nature was quite acceptable to her. She was no stranger to violent men. She didn't mind a big, strong sugar daddy looking out for her. It was reassuring. So this became the hazy focus of her running commentary.

Chaingang hears fragments from a long, disjointed story about a guy she was with named Toby Something, and a rambling, pointless anecdote about a gun and his mind tunes in momentarily as she tells him, “...picked it up and pulled the trigger, and I didn't know, you know, it was loaded, and the gun went off. I was real close to him, you know, like from here to there"—gesturing—"and it went off right in his face and he got burns from the, uh, gun going off and...” She laughed at the memory of it. “And you should have seen the look on Toby's face when I pointed that gun at him and pulled the trigger. He looked so surprised when it went off, and for a second I thought I'd—” And back into the long, drawn-out, ridiculous story as he turned out.

And now he looks at her as she drifts back into the boring nothingness of her past, fascinated by herself, and he lets himself enjoy the lulling effect of her soft, childish voice, the voice of a little girl, and the not unpleasant singsong delivery of the unending, muted flow of verbiage. And to illustrate her point she aims a thin finger at Chaingang and cocks her hand like a gun. SHE IS POINTING AN IMAGINARY GUN AT HIS FACE. He has to beam a horrible smile at the irony of it and he is suddenly awash in the red tide that so frequently engulfs his mind and emotions and makes him do the bad things.

His smile widens at the ease with which he could reach out and break that bony thing she points in his face, snap that finger like a pencil, holding it in the massive vise of his grip that can squeeze flashlight batteries and with no exertion simply press down and forward breaking the finger, giving him the joy of seeing her delicious agony as she suddenly screams and falls, him still holding the finger to control her movements, and then bend it back farther and snap and tear and wring it effortlessly ripping it loose. How much pleasure it would give him to hurt her right this second and thought nearly becomes deed as the feelings flood over him.

He diverts the flow, this time, and lets the scarlet roar and pressure of the blood heat rush through his loins like an infusion of liquid flame and it stiffens him and he goes over to her as she talks and spreads her legs, ripping the flimsy little bikini panties off her, wetting the head of his engorged sex and ramming in, squeezing her soft white thighs, and she is letting herself be manipulated and still valiantly trying to finish the story as her upper body goes back on the bed and he hears, “...as bad as Toby, and I'd wake up and he'd be doin’ it to me in my sleep, ya know, or I woke up, like this one time, ‘n I was so sore that—” Three, four minutes he bangs away, holding her to him in those vise grips. He ejaculates, pulls up his pants, buckles his huge belt that required the entire length of a dead cow to supply a sufficiently long piece of continuous leather. “...'n of course I suspected what he'd been doing to me"—and he pats his pockets for keys—"and like this one guy who took me home one night from this place that me and Mary Beth went to, the Triple Nickel? So we got"—and he picks up the heavy jacket—"so drunk and we were partyin’ outside after"—pats the special canvas pocket—"and this guy who I knew starts"—feels the reassuring weight—"partying with us"—she laughs at the humor of the night, all as real to her as the moment—"and man, we really got"—the weight of the heavy chain excites him anew—"fucking WASTED, you know"—and he heads for the hand pump—"and, God, I didn't even know where"—she hears him in the small, adjoining room, pumping water—"I was or what I was doing."

Daniel Bunkowski's sperm inside her, Sissy sees her man leaving, and she tells him, “The next morning I knew he'd taken advantage of me, you know, ‘cause I was so sore."

The door of the shack opens and she tells his huge back, “Uh, hey, you know maybe next time you ought"—but he is out the door now—"to take [SLAM]—some precautions...?” she asks, her voice trailing off into nothingness. A small tree falling in the forest.

I
t was unusually quiet in the squad room, but Eichord only noticed the stillness when it was shattered by a phone on Brown's desk, and the ensuing one-way conversation that Jack tuned out. Eichord, Lee, Tuny, and Brown were all doing paperwork. The clack of Tuny's typewriter and the deep sonority of Brown's resonant tones had a lulling effect on Jack, who was sleepy and bored and clock-watching at three in the afternoon.

He was doodling. Drawing a picture of the little kitten, a terrible likeness. Filling in the clearly delineated M in the middle of the cat's forehead that seemed to mark so many gray cats, a species of animal about which he knew next to nothing.

But he thought about Boy, their dog, the day it was killed. He still remembered Boy, whom he'd adopted, or who had adopted Jack, while he was working on a murder case in Dallas. He remembered that last day he was holding the dog in his lap and he told the animal, “It's hard to imagine you used to be a starved, puny mutt. Now look what we've got.” He patted the dog. “I guess I've made you what you are today,” he said as he affectionately patted the obese canine's low-slung belly. “Fat,” to which Donna had said cheerfully from the next room, “I certainly hope you're not talking to me,” and they'd laughed. That same day Boy had run out in the street in front of the wrong truck.
Adiós,
Boy. He was glad he'd brought the kitten home. He was sitting there thinking about Tuffy when Lee said, “Jack!"

“Yo."

“Quit that daydreamin'."

“Right."

“You had a weird expression on your face. What were you thinking about?"

“Pussy,” he answered truthfully, “gray pussy."

“I ain't never had any that old yet. Peg's starting to look a little gray but it may be only a urinary infection. That's what we suspect anyway."

“I'm beginning to suspect YOU'RE a urinary infection. I know you sure can piss a person off."

“Hey, that's not bad. Well, that's all right. Shit. I was starting to wonder if you'd lost it. Long as you can still zing one now and then I don't have to worry. In case
tub
” — he gestured at the rotund cop typing at the desk next to his—"ever gets hold of a bad burrito and pulls the pin on me I at least know where I can get a partner with a sense of humor."