dream would be over, this madness of dead killers coming to life, this insanity of his friend's murder, this endless nightmare.
And then, of course, he knew THAT was bullshit.
The airport was about five miles northeast of downtown. He drove slowly, his mind like a frozen stream, icy white and untroubled.
At Kai Tak, he locked the car and walked to the departures counter. Being a careful man, he checked his notes again before handing the message across the counter to the man, who read it and asked, “Round trip, first class?” To which he nodded yes. The man behind the counter said okay, tabulated quickly, and told him “That will be 32,169 Hong Kong dollars, sir.” He handed the exact amount in currency across to the ticket agent. The brotherhood had helped him with the air fare. He would repay the money later.
He would not board for another two hours or so, he was told. He nodded again, took the tickets, and walked through the airport to find a seat in the vicinity of the departure gate. He'd cross the dateline on the long flight over but actually arrive on the same day due to the idiosyncratic nature of the international calendar. He'd leave the following Sunday morning at eight-ten a.m., deplaning back on Kowloon at six p.m. the following day.
He reread his notes once again, reading carefully, his eyes hard as tempered steel and black as a midnight grave.
Only two detectives were in the squad room, Eichord and Brown, each slumped over a desk, each with a phone growing out of their ear, on separate missions, each muttering into a hunk of plastic whose microphone apertures retained the traces of ten thousand breath mints, a quarter-century of cancerous tobacco smoke, a couple of tons of burgers with onions, a small lake of back-to-work tighteners, eight million heartaches in the big, naked city, nine million hours on hold, or, as Chink and Chunk might have said, ten million Wong numbers in Chinatown alone.
“Hello?” Nothing. Nothing but a clicking noise in Eichord's ear. He was calling a TV station to try to keep the lid on the exploding resurrection of the Lonely Hearts case. No please hold, no please stand by, no please please please, just click. Not even a simple “We're too busy to talk right now but if you'll shove the phone receiver up your ass a proctologist will be with you in a couple of weeks.” Finally a few more clicks and a lilting voice told him he'd made contact with the mother ship.
“Ginny Snow please,” he told the voice, and he sat there waiting while it went one ringy-dingy and two ringy-dingies, and finally another voice and another click and Whom shall I say would like an audience with her highness? Eichord was singing tunelessly to himself as he sorted through the voluminous crime-scene reports that now threatened to shove his desk down through the floor, the voice in his ear stabbing him back to life and he began a soft-shoe tap dance with a local television anchorwoman, conning her for all he was worth, doing his best to keep the lid on this thing.
Finally, his task accomplished, he thanked her, made the obligatory promises about dispensing information, all the usual media bullshit, and hung up. Sighed. Checked his directory and then remembered he had a call card on her and dialed Letty Budge over at the
Letty was a total pro who bought nary a word of it, so he gave up his scam and leveled with her. They were friends. She was a responsible journalist. Blah blah. He needed some slack, and he needed it now. Finally, one more odious task was completed, with promises of exclusivity, a bit of a ribbing about “trying to pull her chain,” and he'd managed to buy a few more precious hours.
Eichord knew what it was like when a city was swept up in the awful tide of a pattern of serial crimes. One of his primary functions beyond apprehending serial killers was to placate the media, pure and simple. He was by now such a high-profile cop that anything from him was newsworthy and he didn't blink an eye at using the press the way they so often used him. He didn't like it. He wasn't crazy about it. But it was a vitally important part of his job to keep the flow of ink as managed as he possibly could under the circumstances.
More phone calls. The mock-ups of Bunkowski were almost ready. He told somebody he'd be over in an hour and a half and wanted three copies of everything, plus the master for the new expanded circulars he figured they'd be saturating the town with soon enough. More details. More paper logjam to cut through.
And then, for just a few moments, Jack sat there at the desk in a kind of stupor, listening to Brown murmur in the background, and he thought about his nemesis, Chaingang.
Where are you? What are you doing with that little baby you ripped from the girl in Chattanooga? Why did you take it? Here was a beast who had come back from the dead. Something that ate human hearts. Mutilated. Tortured. Fed. Cannibalized. Gorged to capacity until its vast, demonic hunger was satiated. WHAT IN THE NAME OF CHRIST WOULD IT DO WITH A TINY BABY? He could hardly stand to think of the possibilities.
While his mind was temporarily in the floating state of hold he seized the opportunity to begin what he called his mnemonic doodle. Years ago he'd taken some courses in speed-reading, improved retention, various self- improvement studies designed to aid him in his work. He'd found mnemonic devices well suited to his work style. Mnemonics gave him a way of retaining large amounts of seemingly unrelated data in a manner that was particularly useful when his ever-present pocket recorder wasn't filing it all away on cassette for him.
In an interrogation or during an impromptu interview or at a busy crime scene he could file away reactions, responses, facts, figures, anything imaginable with his mnemonic system. He'd committed over sixty graphic, numerical images to memory, and these are what he drew now as he began doodling:
1. A picture of a gun beside the number.
2. Glue. A bottle of glue tipped over. Spilled. A lake of sticky glue.
3. A crudely drawn tree.
4. Open door.
5. A hive swarming with bees.
6. A pile of sticks.
7. A billowy cloud with the word “HEAVEN.'
8.
Eichord stopped his mnemonic doodle in midstream and thought about the realities of what faced him. He knew what his chances were against this seemingly unstoppable monster.
8. ATE. The things it ate. He doodled an enormous heart with his felt-tip pen and began shading in perspective. Drawing to kill time like some little kid in study hall waiting for the bell and the summertime playground ball game, he doodled the phrase “TO KILL TIME,” and he drew a clock with a dagger in it.
The thing had been honing its skills. Dieting. Starving, no doubt. Healing from Jack's pathetic attempts to
