speaking very slowly and carefully, hoping he could hold her attention—'that you call me if you remember seeing anyone around here tonight you have never seen before. Someone who might have done the bad thing to that woman. Someone strong. Will you think about that for me?'
'I have electrical energy currents that plug into my eyes and it hurts so I cannot receive signals from the moon unless they are sent where that I can and so you will see and come up and come around and come out and— ' She rocked back and forth and held the card he had handed her. He had to leave with Joyce who was finishing a conversation with the lieutenant, and he thanked the old woman who didn't look up. But as he was walking away she said something that sounded like 'You' or 'Yoo-hoo' and he turned and she said, 'Good-bye Mr. Police Boy.' And he smiled and waved at her.
He and Joyce started working their way up the alley or down the alley, whichever it was, and he saw about a dozen others fanning out in teams, patrol guys, half a dozen clothes including two homicide dicks from the 18th, Gomez and Riordan, whom he'd met. Eichord could hear somebody, maybe the young uniform cop, with the dry heaves and he could feel his stomach rumble in spite of himself and he fought to keep the bile from coming up in his throat. He swallowed and concentrated on the make-work at hand.
Someone was both sick and very powerful. To be able to rip human beings apart like that. There'd been a couple with the rib cages totally torn loose. And he remembered the dead farmer they'd found in the pickup across the road from where they'd found the body of the Kasikoff woman. He was a huge, muscular brawler, had a rap sheet even, former bouncer, ex-marine, had a rep for liking to throw a few hands. The killer had taken him effortlessly. Perhaps he'd been an eyewitness to the Sylvia Kasikoff murder and the killer had wasted him to protect himself. But who had he killed first, the woman or the man in the pickup. And why the two together. And were the two of them, the farmer, who was named Avery Johnson he remembered, and the woman— were they connected in some fashion? A boyfriend of the married woman perhaps? All kinds of possibilities to exhaust.
After giving up a couple of hours later and they were dragging back through the alley toward their vehicle, something moved in the shadows against the wall and Joyce tapped Eichord and pointed as the bag lady came out of the shadows, moving toward Eichord out of the darkness, the wheels of her cart rattling toward him.
For just a second or so he imagined she was coming up to him to tell him she remembered seeing a big strong weight-lifter or bodybuilder type and he was going to solve this just like on TV and she came up to him in the light where he and Joyce were standing and smiled pleasantly and confided to him in a conspiratorial whisper.
'Marjorie has snakes and eels nesting in her hair and the current and electricity from the hair comes down and shoots through her hair and into her body and she cannot see what they want because so much planning and decisions all at once and then you don't know where to do or go to next because there is so much happening inside and how can you explain or understand that so much is coming through the air from the moon at night or when energy signals and they never stop so you forget sometimes.'
Like some huge, vast, beached whale, the enormous figure ties sprawled across the tarp that covers the filthy bed. Flat on his back. Snoring slightly, a great rising, falling, ludicrous mound, clown man, dreaming, smiling sometimes as he dreams, his face contorting, pinching into a huge smile there in the darkness and stench.
He dreams he is still driving at this microsecond and in his sleep he hears the steady hum of the white line as he roars through the night toward another kill. He listens to its monotonous, comforting song and becomes one with it.
And the white line hums beneath him, steadily, hypnotically, and Little Baby Danny, the tiny boy who was abused and tortured and molested as a baby, then abandoned later, this other persona of Danny emerges from within, deep inside his dark hiding place where he whimpers from where he has been whipped with the electrical cord.
And Little Danny is hypnotized by the humming white line the long unbroken ceaseless never-ending song of the road humming beneath his moving wheels and his mind is a vision of all white. Virgin white and pure and blemishless and smooth. Hot. A burning, white fire. An incandescence of white heat that scorches the raw edges of his tortured mind.
It comes in a sphere of perfect and infinite roundness, and it burns, burns, burns. It burns with a familiar white fire and if Danny looks at it closely it resembles a white ball as the line continues to sing to him, reassure him, hmmmmmmmmmmm, and he can puncture it with the sharpness of his imagination pricking the white balloon and allowing the blackness of his dark hiding place to fill the sphere, cooling it with its inky liquid and feeling good where the cord has left its fiery stinging marks.
The stream of black fills the round white ball like the ebb of black water rising in a dish of perfect, pure white, rising as the white heat cools in the black water, and the curve of the white dish is a black curve now as the water overflows and fills the dish and the rounding of the black curve that he sees so vividly becomes their gleaming, round piano top that Mommy was so proud of and on the top of her baby grand sits a ticking metronome, his mother's metronome, and Daniel Edward Flowers Bunkowski-Zandt breathes in the essence of the black and stills his beating heart with the ticking of the metronome.
'Tick . . . Tick . . . Tick . . . Tick.'
And subtly, the imperceptible and inexplicable containment begins. Slower, with the slow, measured ticks of the ceaseless ticking pyramid, with every thu-bump, thu-bump, beat of his strong heart he slows wills slows wills slows his heartbeat down slightly, as he dreams he is driving listening to the hypnotic hmmmmmmmmmmmmm of the white line roaring through the dark envelope of night piercing the darkness with his twin lasers zooming toward a kill as the white line comforts him and stills his heartbeat with the measured tick of Mommy's piano-top metronome slowing willing sloooowwwwiiinnnggg
'Tick . . . Tick . . . Tick . . .'
And at first he dreams of a time when he was afraid. Yes, even he is sometimes afraid. He is getting on a bird and he hates them because it hurts his ankle when he drops out of them and then he must walk a long ways and it is not good. He is also afraid of the edge there where he must sometimes sit and he cannot look down or the bloodrush will take him and he will pitch forward and fall thousands of feet and die there in the jungle and he is afraid when he walks under the whirling blade and he is afraid when the noise is so great and there is screaming and he knows that he can shift his weight quickly in a certain way and cause a bird to pitch over and kill everyone in it and it pleases him to think about that when the crew chiefs work to counter his bulk and the only reason he doesn't kill them is that he might hurt himself when the bird tipped over and he is always glad when he feels them lift from him in a whirl of rocks and dust and limbs and stinging things and he often thinks of pitching a frag up into the birds when they lift off and how much fun it would be to see the bird explode in a ball of orange flame and how pleasant it would be to kill the smiling occupants.
But he is a realist and a detail man and he must dream the dream in sequence or he cannot get to the lovely moment when he is there in the jungles killing the humans and taking the parts of them that satisfy his awful hunger and so he must think first of the time when he is still on the bird because that is the way that dream begins:
It is 0230 and he is standing with a fireteam on the pierced steel planking of Ramp 2, at Quang Tri Air-strip, 'Viceroy.' They are boarding a Huey slick, and he must climb in first so that they can position his weight for the takeoff. They are arrogant as all of these helicopter personnel are, and he could easily kill them but they will take him where the killing is unlimited and wonderful, delightful killing fields where he can take many, many human lives, and he ignores these childish men.
The starter makes an awful, pained noise and the turbine begins running up and the blade above them begins wh-yuuuuup, wha-yuuuuuppp, whaaa-huppp, yup, yup, ypppppppppppppppping as it picks up speed and the noise is a deafening blast furnace as the machine groans and shudders and improbable as it always is lifts in a whomp- whomp-whomp of spinning blades and noise and heat and confusion and he can overhear the pilot say, 'Yeah, Diamond 21, Viceroy Tower, we gotta'
