“Prove it.'
“Huh?'
“Let's see ya swim underwater. Swim over here to us. It's only about fifteen or twenty feet. I'll bet you're chicken shit.'
“Yeah,” Whortley Williams, the other bully, dared him. “Too chicken shit to swim underwater. Chicken shit mama's boy.'
“Hell I am,” Jack said as he took a huge breath, filling his lungs with lake air and diving down into the inky black, strong arms pulling, legs scissoring as he swam toward the boys, hard breaststrokes underwater, eyes squinted tight in the cold, muddy lake water, and oh God suddenly something has him caught like a vise the boys are holding him as he tries to thrash out with his arms and legs twisting pulling, no good can't pull free they are bigger and stronger and the two of them have got him and they're holding him under the water and he's fighting to break free and he can't and in the thrashing, heart-pounding panic he tries to scream and swallows about three gallons of foul lake water choking drowning all his air gone screaming without a voice, crying fainting blacking out into death and suddenly waking up bathed in cold sleep sweat and sheet-soaked terror knowing the hangover isn't as bad as it could be. Just grateful now to be awake on the edge of the dream and not dead at the bottom of Sugar Lake. Grateful he can swing his legs out of bed in a minute and that it isn't one of those real ass-kicker headaches that start way behind the eyes somewhere, drilling through the brain, making waking up such a challenge that you keep your eyes closed and the covers over your head, the alky's wake-up call.
But the dream and the fuzzy head combined make it a bad beginning and even then in that jarring self- realization, in those few seconds when you're still honest with yourself, you know you won't be able to get through the day without some medicine. And you wake up anticipating the astringent mouthwash gargle, the taste of the toothpaste, and that first eye-opener. And you light up like the glowing tubes inside an old-time console radio at the thought of that first taste and you know it's starting to take you back down again.
Jack's regimen would be to aim for that kitchen. Get his big coffeecup and fill it full of ice cubes. Splash in four or five ounces of Daniel's. Run a tablespoon or two of tap water across the top and suck some of the medicine right down. Ummmmm. Shudder. Damn. Yes oh Cheerist yes. Ummm. All gone. Jackie drank his medicine down like a good boy. Let's do it again. Shit. This day looks a lot better already. And he'd fill that big cup again and never mind the tap water this time. The ice is starting to melt. The glow permeates. That's how it starts.
He could feel it dragging him down just the way it had before. It had started for him so many years ago. It started way back when he knew there weren't going to be any more heroes. (Of all the ridiculous damn excuses!) Stop and think—from the time the big mushroom cloud billowed below the bomb bay of the
Even real heroes and media darlings like the vegetable hero Chavez, or the fire hero Adair, they'd never been elevated to the status of the heroic personas we once believed in as a nation. Remember the old war heroes like Stillwell and Chennault and Audie Murphy? Imagine a heroic image coming out of the steaming jungles of Southeast Asia. We wouldn't be checking out any movies called
Why was it so all-fired important that the heroes had vanished? The astronauts, the last legitimate hero personas, they seemed to evanesce in the dissipation of Skylab jokes. Who did kids look up to—some faggot rock star with about a gram of snort shoved up each nostril? A pro athlete with one hand on his scrapbook and the other on his $497,000 contract? The heroes had vaporized in the shock waves. And Eichord's core, filled with the detritus of midlife, covered with the eluvium from the Force 17 hurricane of time and technology, fought for air and went down for the third time.
“Just because it wasn't some big mass homicide with three hundred dead people in a locked room ... “Lee had chastized him, “You're still on the job. And since when don't you give a hundred fucking percent?'
I got news, Jimmy old darlin'. Check it out. A hundred fucking percent of zero is zero. Besides that, you wily little Oriental son of a bitch, you scrutable old bastard, you shouldn't hang around me if you can't take a joke, Eichord thought, and reached for the comfort of the half-pint of black Jack he now carried with him. It'll all work out, he thought. Or it won't.
Only one of the first three got a look at him. Yolanda de la Cruz never saw him. She was worrying about her long black, shiny hair looking terrible and windblown when he took her out. She was twenty-two. Formerly Miss Watermelon of Dilly, Texas, where watermelons are no joking matter, and by any standards quite gorgeous. Schlepping her books around the agencies in the Dallas area, getting a good deal of midrange work. Modeling Conventions. The usual stuff. This could be good. It was a call from MG GRAPHICS. Mark Gold to do this print thing for Patio Foods. It was one of Mark's three biggest accounts and she had her fingers crossed as always. This could be the biggie.
“Do we gotta have the window shot, honey?'
“We gotta have the window shot,” he assured her, climbing out the window and his assistant uncoiling cable and handing him the camera carefully as he squatted down on the hot rooftop. “Anything for the Patio account. Now, gimme the face, please, angel.'
She stuck her kisser out the window, at which point the wind blew a hunk of the long mane into her mouth as she said, “Maaaaarrrrrrrk! AAAAHHHH. SPAAAAAWWWW.” Spitting hair out and Mark fighting back a laugh as the young assistant left the corridor heading for the rest room, and the spitting sound the last audible noise Yolanda de la Cruz—workname Yolie Dale—would make prior to the moment of her neck being snapped. She was thinking a thought, cursing cocky little Mark Gold and his queen assistant and trying to spit the hair out of her lovely mouth when she felt herself unhinged. Yes. Unhinged. Dislocated. And suddenly her brain was feeding the oddest signals to her body, and her eyes were seeing from the strangest perspective as she blacked out and the killer picked her up as if she weighed five pounds instead of ninety-five and hurled her through the open window, which is all Mark Gold saw—a blur of woman flying out at him like Supergirl—and he was going out of control hitting the guardrail and both of them going out in space as he grabbed for something, screaming, and his scream as they plummeted off the roof what the assistant heard and moments later he came running out of the rest room and, Where was everybody, and he stuck his blow-dried head out the window and screamed, “Hey!” just as the killer flung him across the roof like a sack of potatoes and he glimpsed the face of the man as he flipped over the guardrail ass over pudding pot, arms flailing, a scream trapped in his throat as his heart gave up the ghost and he cashed in as it were in midflight.
The jogger out by the lake north of Dallas, Linda Wilson, twenty, a pre-med honey going to Baylor—she was number four and she never got a glimpse of the man as he came out from behind the bushes like a snake, soundlessly and smoothly, gliding in behind her panting, hard-breathing footfalls, and instantly blinded her with shock waves of pain and flung her off the edge of the cliffs that were so conveniently near the jogging pathway. The killer loved the feel of throwing someone from a height, the power of seeing them plunge to their death. So reassuring.
The MG GRAPHICS tragedy was assumed to be an awful accident. Everybody knows how these photographers take such chances. It was just terrible, though, the three of them all falling off that roof like that. And there was no reason to ever autopsy Linda Wilson. It was a case of a foolhardy and adventuresome girl who was far too daring for her own good. Everybody said so. And she just got too near the edge. Wrong to be out jogging alone like that anyway. Her body was found crushed on the stones below, but no reason to suspect anything since there was no visible sign of assault or molestation. Just a bad, awfully tragic accident. Pure coincidence that two of the victims had been young and pretty females. Just the breaks.
But the rest of the seventeen random kills and twenty-two assorted missing-persons cases appeared to be without logical connectives. The number—thirty-nine—had a terrible feel to it.
The flaky homicide detectives started doing schtick immediately upon encountering one another in the
