mind-blowers, peyote and pain generators, lasers and leutenizers, tone-harmonic phone numbers, and Mach 4 Finjets, helium-neon beams and stun batons and poison ring and the whole barren wasteland of horrors those CBW dickheads, were cooking up. Dick Calkins in his worst fucking nightmare never envisioned the dark truth of twentieth-century reality. High-tech hell.
And having learned nothing he thanked the Bionic One profusely and glanced at the doodle he'd made on autopilot while his mind freely associated:
1. A gun firing
2. A gluepond
3. 000, the Os interlinked.
And beside them, nothing. Not an image had been retained.
So by late afternoon Eichord was planted down the block from the Collier house in a different unmarked vehicle when Noel pulled into her driveway in the Rolls. In the seat beside him was a cooler full of ice and about three-quarters of a quart of black Jack Daniel's. If he was going to have to sit out here like an idiot he was going to do so with a modicum of the creature comforts.
He had the car radio and the scanner and two-way all on, and he sat there sipping from a coffeecup full of good cheer, listening to a surreal mix of dispatcher crosstalk and that ass-kissing save-the-last-dance-for-me music his favorite station played. It was kind of freaky sitting there in the gathering shadows, thinking about the case and about sexy Noel, listening to coppers respond to calls dispatched to the strains of “Stardust” and “Moonglow.'
They had the confrontation about six-thirty, when a strange car pulled up behind Noel's and Eichord saw Joseph Hackabee get out and approach the house. He seemed to be expected and he was inside immediately, with Jack close behind and breathing hard.
“Yes?” She was startled to see him there when she opened to his insistent cop knock.
“You okay, Miss Collier?'
“Of course I'm okay. What in God's name?'
“May I come in?” he said, all but jamming a shoe in the door, feeling so suave and in control, and she didn't say yes or no but she stepped back, luckily, as he blundered through the door, tripping and going on his face but for the steadying arm of Noel's new protector, who said to him in a deep voice, “That was very deft,” as he saved him from falling, which only served to make it worse.
“Make yourself at home,” she told him icily as he barged past her. He could feel the booze warming him, pretty far along at that point.
“Mr. Hackabee,” Jack said somewhat expansively, “what's going on?'
The man had his arm in back of Noel proprietarily. “I don't think there's much point in offering you a drink, mmm?'
“I think he's already had a few,” she said, frowning. “Isn't that right, Mr.—uh, I'm sorry, I've forgotten your name.'
“Eichord, MIZZ Collier,” he said to the room. It looked like a fucking, art museum. “Just checking to see how you're keeping.
“Uh huh.” She glared at him with eyes like dagger points.
Even whacked to the gills and falling-down drunk he could still admire her for what she was. The most beautiful woman he'd ever seen, in his life. The white dress was sufficiently decollete that he looked up from it, back into the daggers, and she said, “I think you'd better leave. And if you bother us again,” she started talking about some kind of restraining-order deal.
He was fogged up so badly he couldn't think. The booze and his slick moves had left him paralyzed. He'd been unprepared and unprofessional. He could not remember a time before, even at the worst of his drinking problem when he'd had no idea what to do in the execution of his job. He just stood there looking at this untouchable, inaccessible object of his unrequited admiration and then at Hackabee, rich and elegant and unruffled and suave, standing in his own potent swirl of bourbon fumes trying to defog enough to know what to do next.
“Anything else? We're late for dinner.'
“Guess not,” he mumbled, and forced himself to walk steadily as he shame facedly made his way out of the door and down the steps, negotiating his way carefully back to the car. He got in and turned all the radios off and just sat there, shivering a little for no particular reason. In a few minutes he saw them go out and get in Hackabee's rented car and he scrunched down a little hoping he wouldn't be seen.
But Hackabee began backing up until the cars were even and Noel had rolled down her passenger-side window and was saying something to him, a hostile look on her beautiful face. He rolled his window down.
“What?'
“I said we're going to the Mansion. It's on Turtle Creek. I don't advise you try to follow in your condition. You might want to radio for another surveillance car to pick us up when we leave there, but I don't suggest you do that. If I catch them watching I'll have you all surgically removed tomorrow and I
“Hey, Eichord,” Joe Hackabee said, laughing openly and shaking his head as if he couldn't believe this idiotic drunk. “Spooky.
Somehow Jack made it back to the motel but he could not remember anything except a telephone conversation between the time he left the Collier house and the time he woke up, throat raw, stinking like a broken booze bottle, head pounding, shaking, disoriented, and for some reason frightened. No dog in sight. No wonder— he'd forgotten to set either food or water out. The dog was a survivor and he probably recognized a basket case when he saw one.
The worst of it was the fear and paranoia that seized him from the second he woke up. He shrugged it off, hoping against hope that he'd hallucinated the embarrassment at Noel Collier's house and that he hadn't really (sigh) phoned Donna Scannapieco in the middle of the night, drunk as a judge, totally wiped, calling up to ask for a date. No fucking
He went in and looked at the bleary-eyed mess staring back at him from the mirror and muttered an appropriate response to the looking glass. It summed up the tortuous, winding anfractuosity of his own neural pathway this morning. It summed up the entire Grave-digger case. It summed up the whole Dallas experience. An aphorism worthy of the world-class phrase-makers. Orwellian. Aristotelian.
“Shit, fuck. Piss on a duck,” he said.
The day began bad and progressively worsened. The waves of trouble came in the wake of a couple of bitter, threatening, and abrasive calls from one of the senior partners at Jones-Seleska, and from Ms. Collier in person, one to Michaels, one to Michaels’ superior, one threatening to bring some serious pressures from the hierarchy above, one in which a lot of words like “alcoholism,” “injunction,” “harassment” (mispronounced as usual), and “court order” were thrown back and forth like flattened Ping-Pong balls, crazed and erratic, impossible to return, the overall effect on Eichord a jangling, disconcerting one.
In the course of talking with Wally he finally put it all together. He was so smashed when he left Noel's house he'd forgotten to pull the Highland Park guys off her, and they were slowly rolling by eyeballing the residence late last night when Collier saw them out in front. Needless to say, there was no more surveillance.
Jack sensed that his booze problem had grown to a greater proportion than he was able to subjectively appreciate. But that's the thing about alcoholism, it's so easy to crawl inside the bottle and hide. And even with the bottle rolling off the table and breaking, you can stay in there and peer through the jagged edges of your life, looking out through the conchoidal spider tracks in the breakage—hiding from the critical world inside your shattered amber womb of glass.
It had been an uncomfortable moment, especially for Michaels, who clearly was an Eichord fan, when Wally had to mention the dread word “alcoholism” in his summary of the complaints from Noel's law firm. It made him vulnerable to attack that was all but indefensible, made it more difficult for him to function as an investigator, and made Wally Michaels look like a dumb so-and-so for bringing him in on the case to begin with. His way of handling it was to get out of the cop shop as soon as he could and find a nice, salty, dark tavern.
This time of the day the bartenders seldom screwed around with you. Little ma-and-pa tavern. They're not
