Slob (2 page)

With any luck Lee Anne would never see any of the old newspaper headlines. The ones that said "MAN FOUND MUTILATED" were bad enough. But the tabloids had started calling the murderer "The Lonely Hearts Killer." It was a phrase that still hovered over Edie like a cloud full of acid rain. And now, two years later, the name was back in the papers again. He was still out there somewhere. That—that THING that had killed Ed and taken his heart.

T
he mist thickens, solidifies, begins dripping, settling over him like a wet, clinging blanket. Dropping down over the trees like a vast, ominous shroud that drapes the triple canopy in moist blackness. The night noises intensify. The air is redolent with the smell of rotting fish and the presence of death. This is cadaver country.

The spooky killer's moon has all but vanished now, the yellow almost gone, and yet he sees HE SEES each blade of grass, each slime-covered twig, every veiny leaf and every drop of every bead of moisture rain mist dew dampness glistening clearly sparkling and dancing on the leaves. HE SEES. It is not just night vision. He sees without seeing. Sensing would perhaps be a better word. Sensing the atoms and molecules of the air and the matter and the nothingness of the dark. He owns the night now.

The presence of death stands and breathes slowly, deeply of his nightworld. He hears the trees whisper and laugh there in the wet blackness. It is the faraway tinkle and shatter of jagged vampire laughter and it makes Death smile his huge, radiant, dimpled smile. In his mind's eye he sees a coven of witches moving now, gliding through the jungle night like a breeze rustling through rice paper, and he slows wills slows his massive heartbeat almost to a standstill.

It is the lurking presence of black, oily death waiting there in the jungle scarcely breathing, unmoving, still, infinitely patient, unspeakably evil. It senses the movement that is coming down the worn hardball trail, out there in the night somewhere beyond the great triple-canopied jungle edge, across the fields and paddies and beyond the far treeline, coming down the hardball that is their nighttime foul-lane blacktop, moving quietly through the darkness.

Tick . . . Tick . . .

But he is not in the jungle now he is driving in a stolen car, driving carefully if aimlessly, driving the darkened streets of a strange town, sensors purring, tuned, vigilant, concentrating on his surroundings. He is never lost, confused, he has his strong inner compass that always points him back on trail. His mind is a heat-seeking device that homes in on the warmth of a vulnerable human heartbeat. He likes it here, driving without purpose through these cozy suburbs. His smile is wide and dimpled. He beams with pleasure at the thought of the families inside those houses.

Death likes to drive through strange, darkened, suburban streets at night, sightseeing as you would take your loved ones to look at the Christmas lights on a chill and snowy December's eve, bundled up and filled with good cheer, your heart filling with joy at the sight of the brightly lit yards and homes bedecked in multicolored displays and scenes of the Nativity. He warms at the sight of the golden lights, the
mystery
of the darkened homes full of loving families. He loves it.

For to Death a drive through the suburban tract homes of idle America is to take a sightseeing tour through the strange, wondrous, and exotic locale of some unknown country. The residential landscape at night is as alien to this creature as if it was a vision of a far distant planet. Who could live in that home with those twinkling, golden lights, he wonders in something approaching awe. What are they doing in there? In that expensive, neat, well-tended home over there he senses that there are human beings living their quiet lives behind those walls.

And in the foreign landscape he sees, senses, an endless smorgasbord of humanity there for the taking. An infinite variety of humans all happy and snug in their little, brightly lit shelters, safe from all harm behind their ridiculously thin walls and flimsy doors with their televisions sets and pets and toys, and as he imagines the boundless delights that await his pleasure that are his for the TAKING he can taste the thrill of it and if he doesn't stop the spreading heat of it that is coming over him he will pull up in one of these concrete driveways and go kick down a door and feed this rapacious, awesome appetite of his, and he lets it roar up into his head and it is the color of blood and it has the rich, red, bitingly cuprous smell and taste of life's fluid.

And now he is out of the car and moving toward humans again, moving through the darkness on those powerful treetrunk legs, faster than anyone alive has ever seen him move, and in his right hand he is holding a heavy coil of taped tractor-strength safety chain. In a few seconds he will see the little people coming down the hardball there in the blackness and he feels the strong human heartbeat nearby and he churns ahead into the pitch black where the human is.

The blunt, thick fingers shaped like huge, steel cigars lash out with the coil of chain and it cracks into something solid and there is a scream and his face beams with the joy of it using that thick, rock-hard wrist and forearm of bulging muscle with the fluid snapping motion that he's worked on until it is a part of him all smooth and automatic as he makes the lethal chain smash out, uncoiling and striking like a big snake whipping out and splitting the human head open snakewhipping into the man killing him in that one powerful smacking wet bloodsmear.

And the hot, red, rushing thing has set his brain on fire and Death has dropped the dripping links of chain and is slashing out with that big, razor-sharp bowie all wild and insane with his surging pressure cooker exploding as he rips the human open taking the fresh heart in a tearing, gutting, rending of flesh and offal and bloody organs and bone as the profluent river of Death floods the night and nothing stops a river.

E
ven nine years later I could still taste the sharp and smoky bite of Tennessee sour-mash sippin' whiskey. I could remember just the way it looked all honey golden and amber there in the glass, the first Blackjack Rocks of the day, four fingers of Jack Daniel's black label sloshed into a big, serious drinking glass loaded with ice cubes. And the way that first sip tasted, the sharp kick of it as it burned down to warm your innards. God, how I loved to drink. And how I hated to stop.

I pulled my life together nine years ago. I remember it vividly even now. It was one of those suicidal Mondays when the pervasive mood was bleak, hopelessly dour, wintry, and downbeat. Another motel room. Another awful day full of depression, lots of scary surprises, hidden horror, coming confusion that would want to make you go back inside and pull the blinds shut. One of those cold, anxious, bone-chilling days you could still recall from the sixth grade, bundling up in a sweater and then some great, heavy coat topped with hat and muffler, on your way nowhere, facing the desolation of imponderable, countless weeks of nothingness before the next vacation when a kid could live again. It was like that and a hundred times worse. A killer hangover kicked on the door of my mind.

I was out east at the time, jobless and purposeless, a bust-out drunk about ten cases away from a relief mission. Getting close. I sat in this cockroach motel drinking Black Jack at 8:25 A.M. Aimless and helpless. I didn't know why I was awake this early. Why I was in this motel. What had happened the day before. Or where I was going. I went out and got in my car, the interior of which smelled like a distillery, and that's when it began.

I still recall the feel of those cold seat covers and the way my hot breath fogged up the windshield as I sat there with the DTs—I'd had the shakes before but never like that. I felt like my whole body was going to come apart. I could hear my own nerve ends screaming in pain. And that's where it hit me, right there in the front seat of that old Chevy, it hit me that I had become an alcoholic. Because in a frightening moment of icy reality, I realized that I had forgotten who I was. I actually wasn't sure of who was inside my skin. I could remember my own name but nothing else. It was so monstrously disorienting that it scared me sober.

I remember I cranked down the window, head throbbing like a set of drums at a rock concert, and I poured my booze out onto the parking lot. That was the last time I ever took a serious drink. I'll still have a cold beer or two. Even three. But the booze is just a memory now. Beginning that very day I started pulling my life back into shape. Within a year I was totally off the sauce, back on the force in the Midwest, and married, with a pregnant wife.

A lot of people have wondered how I quit "so easy." I couldn't explain it to anybody else. Think of it this way. Do you smoke cigarettes? If so, imagine a doctor you really trust coming to you and saying, "Okay, pal, if you smoke ONE MORE CIGARETTE you will die. Instantly. That's it. Goodbye." Unless you are the exception, even the five-pack-a-day folks will probably stop lighting up. Fear is an amazing thing. Imagine if the Surgeon General could put on a pack of weeds IF YOU SMOKE THESE IT WILL KILL YOU. It would probably work a bit more effectively than the current pussyfoot disclaimer. There was never any thought of drinking for me. I was through with it.

But I still loved the thought of the booze. I really liked to drink. I could still enjoy just thinking about walking into some dark, salty bar about two-thirty in the afternoon and watching the bartender pour my first double or triple shot. Maybe it's something a drunk never gets out of his system. Perhaps your body chemistry never goes into remission or readjusts to doing without. And I never doubted that inside my middle-aged skin I was still every inch a drunk. As the saying went, the only difference between being an alcoholic and being a drunk was that a drunk didn't have to go to meetings. I guess I'm a drunk and not an alcoholic. I'd like to say
reformed
drunk but I've read enough of the literature to know you don't press your luck.

For insurance I still had a real clear picture of that day sitting in that refrigerator of a car, gasping for air as the sledgehammer-anvil chorus worked out on my head, smelling that car's stink and trying to remember exactly who and what I was and where I was headed.

I woke up alone as I often did, not getting off on hookers and not being the type who gets lucky with strangers that often, and didn't waste any time getting ready for work. Work was my whole life now. I had been alone so long that I'd wiped most of the memories of Joan out of my mind. Joanie had been gorgeous, seductive, and a rich preppie to boot. I blew it with her. First with the job, then with the booze, and then with the job again. Looking back on it, which I no longer bothered to do, we probably didn't have that much going beyond a fierce physical compatibility. She hated The Job. It dominated our lives, of course, and quite rightly she viewed it as her competition.

So Joanie would try a little harder to be sexier, and she started taking courses in gourmet cooking, and reading these self-improvement books, and every conversation started to be a kind of verbal duel. She'd wake up each morning trying to see who was ahead, and it would be The Job 31, Joan 14, and so she'd seduce me before I could get my first cup of coffee down, and even that wasn't such bad duty at first. It was only when she couldn't compete against the "other woman," the bitch that took me away in the night, that our thing started wearing thin. A call was enough to send her right up the wall. And one night the damn phone rang as she was serving up the latest in her great culinary experiments and she overheard me saying I was on my way—and that tore it.

It was kind of funny looking back on it. She picked up a piece of her mother's Havilland and walked up to me and broke it over my head, called me a sonofabitch, and stomped into the bedroom in a symphony of slammed doors. It doesn't sound like much. It didn't hurt much. I have a thick skull as many of my colleagues will readily testify. But our relationship shattered like the china from that moment. It just sort of shrugged its shoulders and disintegrated.

Now when I woke up I'd try to get out of my small apartment as soon as I could, and I was very seldom there before bedtime. I'd gone from alcoholic to workaholic and I was thriving on the regimen. And it hadn't hurt the career. I'd been lucky a couple of times and developed a reputation, partially undeserved, for being one of the nouveau experts in certain types of homicides, the so-called serial murders.

When Jack Eichord poured out his last Daniel's and threw himself into the business of crime solving he became something of a textbook classic. In a city where the way of life on The Job is the "pad" or "arm," a kind of acceptable blue-suit payola that evolved from stolen apples and freebie doughnuts up through complete wardrobes and home entertainment centers, and then into the natural progression of dope and dope money—Eichord was a glaring anachronism.

The police in his midwestern city had excused corruption and stealing for so many years that it was regarded as simply the way to play catch-up for the short salaries and the absence of hazard pay. Nobody talked about it. It was just the way things were done. It started at the top level and worked its way down through the deputy chiefs and the rest of the top brass and filtered down through the street-beat cops, traffic cops, and flat-footed detectives.

But Eichord kept his principles because he didn't care about anyone else's corruption, he was only interested in solving murders. And if there were as many thieves on the force as off it, that wasn't his worry. He didn't like it much but he knew he couldn't do anything about it and it didn't keep him awake nights. He'd take the little stuff so as not to call undue attention, the free cop meals that went with the territory, but the rest of the goodies he passed on. And nobody else cared. He wasn't a boat rocker. He was just a little weird.