Iceman (7 page)

“Well, we all want to go to heaven, right? But nobody wants to die."

“
Y
ou need to talk to the special counsel over there,” Eichord told the person on the other end of the telephone. “Huh-uh. No, I don't,” he said, after a pause. “Okay. Will do. Talk to you later.” And he hung up just in time, just as the booming tones of fat Dana rang down the stairs.

“Fuckin’ dumb shit,” Monroe Tucker muttered to no one in particular at the sound of his partner's loud voice.

“They were outta that other crap so I got a bear-claw.” He started passing foul coffee around. The coffee from across the street was hideous, and the cardboard cups made it worse, but it was still better than the poisonous slime they brewed in the squad bay.

“What's that 202 number I gave ya yesterday?” Eichord said to Dana's back as he handed out goodies from the sack.

“Black through and through,” he told his partner as he handed him the cardboard cup.

Tucker nodded and said, “So is this,” cupping his load.

“Dana?"

“Say what?"

“Gimme the Privacy Act Unit number already."

“What do I look like, a fuckin phone book?"

“You look like the Macy's Dumbo float but gimme the 202 number I gave you yesterday."

“Okay. Hang on.” He ignored Eichord and sat down at his desk with a thump, his broken chair tilting dangerously to one side as he unwrapped food.

“Sometime this year if possible,” Eichord said patiently.

“Shit, gimme a fuckin second,” he whined, stuffing a huge sugary donut into his face.

Buckhead Station was a workplace in transit. It seemed to be going downhill, like The Job itself, and Eichord felt powerless to do anything about it. Chink and Chunk, James Lee and Dana Tuny, had been partners for about a century, Eichord's friends, guys who'd stayed with him through his booze years, and both Dana and Jack had been devastated by Jimmie's death.

Fat Dana had become absurdly protective of Jack in the ensuing months. Additionally, his rotund pal seemed to feel that he had failed his buddies in some way. His detective work grew sloppy, and when he'd been assigned a new partner, he had started doing everything he could to get kicked off the force. Eichord had traveled
that
road, too.

Monroe Tucker, a massive, two-fisted black man, had not been the ideal choice for a partner to Dana. The captain couldn't seem to grasp the fact that just because Tuny had partnered with an Oriental for years did not make him an expert in biracial relations. In fact, both Tucker and Tuny were bigoted, hard-nosed guys used to doing it their own way. The partnership had been a volatile one, but at least Dana was more or less back to his old self, and doing some semblance of competent police work. Yet the overall efficiency of the unit had continued to decline.

“Unnnnng,” Dana said through a mouthful of food, handing a sticky piece of paper to Eichord.

“Thanks,” Jack said, making a show of holding it by the tip and shaking off the residue.

“I'm the only one in this whole fuckin place knows what he's about,” Dana said, taking a noisy sip of coffee and wiping at the front of his shirt absent-mindedly, like somebody who was used to having crumbs all over him.

Eichord remembered the time it had all come to a head. The first homicide they'd been on after Tucker had been transferred from Metro. Woman and a dude both dead of gunshot wounds. One of the scenes that was so unreal everybody figures it has to be apocraphyl when the coppers trade stories later.

Jack could see the building as if it was yesterday, a run-down duplex with the orange tape around the exterior. A crime scene sealed off by the upside-down legend DO NOT CROSS POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS. And if you kind of squinted and let it run together it said CROSS POLICE LINE DONUT. And he can see them all going in and the blood and the bodies there.

Each man was a different-style detective. Eichord into vibes, the feel of a scene, the aura. Dana, when he wasn't being sloppy, was a plodder. Meticulous. A detail man as good as any evidence tech. Tucker was a steamroller type. His method of getting from point A to point B was to run full speed until he crashed into a wall.

“In here,” Dana had said, and Eichord had gone in the room where the man was.

“That the shotgun?” It was rhetorical. It looked like a murder/suicide. One of the bad domestic things you'll catch when the moon is right. For the first few minutes everybody was conducting the business at hand. So far so good. It appeared the man had killed his woman, blowing her apart with three or maybe four up-close blasts. You had to be sorely steamed at somebody to keep shooting them like that. Racking those spent shells out and letting another hot load of lead pellets perforate what had been a human being. Then, with the last shell up the spout and ready, the man had apparently killed himself.

“He did her in there. Then he comes in and sits down on the bed and gets all comfy and puts the gun up to the side of his head and pulls the trigger. BANG!"

“Yeah."

“And he's all over the walls."

The gun had pulled slightly and the scatter of shot had completely blown off the front of the man's face. Until you've seen a person with their face shot off, you can't imagine what it looks like.

They were in the bedroom, with Tucker and Brown in the room with the woman and the other cops, and Tuny whispered to Eichord, “Look,” in his most frightening, hushed tone of voice.

And Jack came over and saw what it was. It was plastered to the mirror like it had been glued there. The man's mustache, complete with a flap from his upper lip, perfectly peeled as if it had been shaved off with a knife, and Tuny got behind Jack and moved him over slightly and it looked like Jack was wearing the man's mustache in the mirror, and in spite of all the blood and the smell and the awful horror, the two of them giggled and it was all Dana needed to do something that you just didn't do on murder investigation—you don't touch the evidence.

He reached over and peeled the mustache and lip off the mirror and held it at his side, an evil glare in his eyes.

“Hey, Mon-ROOOOOE, come ‘ere, man."

“—tryin’ to burn some coffee grounds but we couldn't find any, so we found some cloves out there in the kitchen and put ‘em in a pan—"

“Somethin’ I, er, uh, want to ax you,” Dana said, “Monnnnn—roooe,” exaggerating the accent. “How come you don't have no mustache?"

“Say WHAT?"

“You know, all you black dudes got them little pussy ticklers. Little pencil-line jobs. How come you don't have one?"

“Bullshit,” he said, turning to Eichord, “this fat boy here gone gunny-fruit or what?” One thing Monroe Tucker didn't like was fat, white, bigoted, honkie chuck wise-ass jokers. And one thing he especially didn't like was practical jokes played on him. Which is when and why and how and who and what and where fat Dana slapped something up on the black cop's face saying, “Well, NOW you got one. Check it out,” holding the cop's arms as he spun him toward the blood-flecked mirror so that he could see himself wearing the man's mustache, surgically removed by double-O buck, complete with lip remnant, and Eichord could still hear his howl of rage, his scream of grossed-out horror, his primal yell of shock and anger, and his frantic slapping at himself, and then his attack, which nearly put Dana in the hospital, Eichord pulling them apart, gentling Tucker down, all the while laughing to himself at the unbelievable madness of the work he did.

Even now he could hear the echo of fat Dana's one-liner that would live on at Buckhead Station as a kind of mini-legend.

“Well, there's one dude who won't shoot his mouth off again."

T
he handsome man with the strikingly beautiful woman walked around the corner of the hotel corridor—that is
she
walked around the corner—as they moved through a pocket of tourists standing at some sort of information counter. He was what you saw first, but she was what you speculated about, whispering of her beauty, wondering if she was a showgirl or perhaps a high-priced courtesan.

She walked behind him, a comforting presence, and he had a fixed smile on his face as they moved through the hayseeds. She knew how he liked to be treated and it relaxed him a bit. He was always somewhat on edge right before heavy play, and one less thing to concern himself with was a definite plus. He could count on her.

She was a knockout, and it never failed to amuse and please him the way not just men but women too stared when she—when THEY—came into a room. He liked her best in low-cut necklines when they went shopping to those carefully selected stores that he considered accessible, to clubs, bars, restaurants, but not to the casinos.

When he gambled he wanted her decorous. Sexy but decorous. So he kept her in tailored suits. Sweater ensembles. High-necked cocktail dresses. It mattered not. They, the pair of them, still drew an instant crowd, but with the low tops guys would hover like buzzards, pressing around them at the tables for a closer look at those perfect breasts, the finest that money could buy. And it made nun uncomfortable and fucked his concentration over, so that's why he had her dress up her act a little for the tables.

The casino was buzzing tonight. Heavy play in the neon beehive. A swirl of activity, a cloud of smoke, a circumambience of continuous movement inside a vast and noisy arena. They were moving in the direction of the roulette table with the least action. Like most of the plush joints on the strip, this one only had two wheel tables and this was his action. Red and black. He was like the good-looking masthead on a ship's prow, cutting through the waves of moving jerks, slicing purposely through the congestion with his beautiful Nicki behind him, leaving the small fish gasping in their wake.

They reached the table and he beckoned her to him with a hand.

“I love your ass,” he whispered to her possessively as she smiled at him. A beautiful, dazzling, perfect smile. “You gorgeous bitch."

She smiled and kissed him very lightly, saying, “I love you, too,” saying something else endearing, whispering so softly he couldn't hear over the din.

He loved that soft, feminine voice. Jeezus. Who'd ever guess? In a million fucking years you'd never know that Nicki was a guy.

Of course she WASN'T. He never thought of her as a young man or a transvestite or anything like that. Even the first time they'd made love, when he'd drawn her on that weird outcall thing, back when she was tricking. He smiled. “Tricking.” What a word. Perfect for Nicki. She was a trick, all right. Even then, first time he'd found out about the “plumbing” problem, he'd accepted it as just one more terrific joke by the cosmic stand-up comic. Nothing about her was a turn-off. Least of all what she really was, clinically and legally.

She loved the way he treated it as nothing. Joking with her about it. Something something cock-and-bull story changing to a cock-and-balls story. He'd shrugged it off. Getting a smile out of her, then a guilty pleasure laugh or two, and then out of nowhere Nicki felt herself drawn into his life, falling head over heels in love with her handsome John.

He'd changed her life overnight. Immediately convinced her to give up tricking. He'd give her the operation money. Fine. The next thing she knew he was also talking her out of the operation. Not permanently, just as a holding action.

“I don't want to be apart right now. Not just when we're beginning our life together,” he'd reasoned. It made sense. She had to have the surgery, and he understood that, he said. Just not quite yet. But in truth he saw no reason for her to go under the knife. She was perfect as is. Beautiful. Docile. Obedient. Kee-rist—the perfect woman.

He wasn't all that crazy about the look of a female snatch anyway. Oral sex was fine. The best. He'd always had to fight back the revulsion when he'd had intercourse with a woman, especially older women. It wasn't so bad when he'd been poking his sister: she was so ... vulnerable or something. So nonthreatening. But older broads, they seemed to snap at him with those gaping pussies. Wanting to capture his male pride down there and squeeze the masculinity out of him. No, the plumbing was no big deal.

He thought of Nicki as a beautiful woman with one small physical flaw. So what? She had perfect breasts—tit jobs that had set her back a fortune. Her Beverly Hills he called them. That cute clipped nose like some fucking movie star. Skinny. Terrific tush. Great legs! An added bonus, as that was one of the things the sawbones couldn't redesign. Most of the guys who changed over just didn't have the legs for it. She was nothing short of a hundred percent sensational. And she gave head that was to die for.

“Not YOU again,” the croupier joked. One of his favorite dealers, Alberta, was working. Good. He pulled out a precounted ten and fanned it out across the blue felt.

“No.” He smiled at her and offered the bucks. “It's somebody else this time."

The other dealer laughed.

“I told you it wasn't him this time,” the other girl said.

“Nine thousand dollar chips, nine hundreds, four quarters,” he told Alberta.

“Yes, sir,” she said, stacking up the chips next to the toke glass. A pit boss whom he didn't recognize was right on top of it telling them to examine the money carefully, but obviously speaking to the new girl, clearly just starting on the job, without a name tag on her pocket.

“Always look at the back of the bills,” he said in a loud voice, oblivious to the man in the wheelchair.

Satisfied, the pit boss backed off and noted something on a pad of paper. The man in the chair was already rated so he'd be in the hotel's computer. Come on, he thought, but he only held the fixed smile as they put the money down the table slot into the cashbox.

He was pushed up against the table, Nicki behind him with a slim hand resting lightly on his left shoulder so the guys would know she was his property. He was in the first position next to the wheel, first base, and the chair put him slightly below the level of the other players seated on stools around the side and end of the roulette layout.

Alberta slid the tall pyramid of stacked chips across to him. Actually twenty-two chips was not a tall stack—only if you knew there was ten thousand dollars there. The pit boss glowered at him as he slid his first chip out. A crowd had already begun to gather, guys moving in for a closer look at Nicki, and then the yahoos and hayseeds gathering to see the man stacking thousand-dollar chips. He was always conscious of the eyes of the watchers, self-conscious of the jerks who would whisper about the man in the chair.