Frenzy

The loud voices echoed through the Homicide squad room at Buekhead Station.

'It's your turn, that's why,' the fat detective snarled at his friend as he produced a couple of withered ones from a disreputable-looking billfold. He leaned over with some effort and tossed the folded bills onto his partner's desk. 'Large coffee-with and one 'of them big long things looks like a schvatza's pecker.'

'Say ya want a big long thing that looks like Arnold Schwartzenegger?'

'Missing out on life?' fat Dana Tuny announced to the room, cupping his ear like a radio broadcaster and pushing his voice down an octave. 'Why go another day without the revolutionary new hearing aid from Say What Incorporated. It's the exciting hearing aid made for assholes! That's right! You heard me correctly. It's the new miracle hearing aid shaped like a suppository. You stick it in your ass instead of your ear —'

'What's a five-letter word beginning with S that means Athenian lawgiver?' Jack Eichord interrupted from across the squad room where he was engrossed in a crossword puzzle.

'Schmuck,' James Lee said helpfully.

'Schmuck is six letters, you schmuck. Hey, Eichord, Lee's goin' across the street. You wanna banana daiquiri or anything? Or is the sun over the yardarm yet? I mean, it's eight-forty-five in the morning, hey?' The partners began to giggle like little girls.

'Sorry, I didn't hear that, I have a banana daiquiri in my ear,' Eichord muttered.

'You ain't supposed to be diddlin' around any-whichway,' Lee told him. 'I heard you were on some big-mob thing.'

'Yeah. Tryin' to find out who wasted Dutch Schultz.'

'I'm workin' on it right now,' Eichord mumbled-'SOLON — that's the mother.' He filled the word in.

'What'd he say?' Lee said to his partner.

'Say what?'

'Say WHAT? What do I look like anyway, a hearing aid for assholes?'

'I said Solon,' Eichord told them.

'Okay,' Lee said, getting up and heading for the door, 'so long.'

'Yeah,' Tuny called to him, 'write if you get work and hang by your balls.'

Long ago Jack had learned to tune them out. If you worked out of Buckhead it was a thing you developed early on. A hearing aid for assholes, he thought as he doodled the word Solon with a black pen. He shook his head.

He had learned a trick about detective work from a writer. A nice old gent by the name of Carlton E. Morse. Guy used to write I Love a Mystery and One Man's Family on radio. Morse had taught him the secret of opening your mind to the flow of ideas. Another dude who was in the intelligence racket had shown him a trick or two to make the flow come easier. Eichord appeared to be doodling aimlessly but his spongelike mind was soaking up whatever trickled over the top of the dam.

He had drawn a huge S O L O N and made the two Os into old-time pie-cut eyes. Given them eyebrows. And as he blacked in the eyes pushing hard with the felt-tip pen over and over, the paper tore and his pen plunged through one of the eyes and he saw the eyes of the first cadaver, the bloody sockets, the headline EYEBALL MURDERS, the eyes of a little monkey holding its hands over its eyes, SEE NO EVIL printed on a greeting card, and a man looking up from a card, casually, but with a flicker of recognition in the wiseguy eyes, and it all merged in Eichord's mental storehouse as he picked up the phone to call the Major Crimes Task Force, his employer of record.

Eichord had looked into many unusual mob assassinations because they had drawn lots of ink in a given jurisdictional area. Jack was just one of the people the feds would pull in on crimes of homicide that would draw what might be termed 'undue notoriety.' Potential scandals, in other words. Sensitive homicides. Most of these were not technically serial killings. A serial kill, at least the way MCTF played it, was when there were four or more related murders. That was the official Quantico definition. Who ever decided three weren't but four were — that nobody could ever quite pin down, but the definition stuck.

Three men down. Eyes blasted out. Payback, West Coast Mafioso-style. Wise-guy eyes. SEE NO EVIL. A too- casual glance away after the flash of visual recognition.

'Hey, homeboy, what's to it?' he says into the phone. 'Yeah. I got a biggie.' Pause. 'Don't say can do until I lay it on you.' Polite chuckle. 'What I need is — I need to know the name of every male passenger who left for St. Louis from LAX between five-thirty and six A.M. on —' He glances at a calendar and gives the man a date.

'Huh uh. No, I'm not sure what gate either.' But then in that open sponge a metallic voice resonates:

PASSENGERS NOW BOARDING FLIGHT TWA BLAH BLAH FOR ST. LOUIS GATE 41. He can see SEE NO EVIL looking up from the greeting card at the voice over the speakers, leaving, moving out a boarding gate. 'It might be forty-one. Forty-four. I don't recall. I think it was a TWA flight. But check 'em all please. Yeah, I know. I want whatever the airline has on all those males. There couldn't have been that many planes leaving L.A. for St. Louis at that time of the morning. Be surprised if there's more than one. Thanks, babe. Yeah — I need it day before yesterday.'

Eichord flashes on the eyes, trying to put a face with it, but nothing comes. Just hooded eyes looking up. Cop awareness. Savvy showing. Cops and wise guys are habitual watchers, and old-cop habits die hard. Could be anything. Could be nothing. But after so many years in the arena Jack Eichord had finally learned to trust hunches.

Under the S O L O N artwork with the penetrated eyeball he printed SEE NO EVIL, and the words laid a shiver against his spine.

Belmonte had a nice, tight little operation, and a secretary with a nice, tight little pussy, and this shit with the snuff movie got him so hot he couldn't wait to get back to her. Cathy was always complaining about her big work load and he'd got her a secretary of her very own. She was good-looking, but dumber than a fucking lox. And he was already starting to work the new girl over too.

He liked to go up and rub his package right in those big fawn eyes and be talking some movie bullshit to her but stiffening right in her face. Let that hard cock tent the fly of his slacks and show her what he had while she squirmed around and tried to act like she wasn't looking. A nice two-handed pat on the shoulders. Welcome to the team and whatever. And rub that nice hard cock against her cheek just a little. Get Cathy over and start some serious touching right in front of her.

He liked her in old-time hooker clothes. Today she'd had on that out-of-style 60s green mini-skirt. Fish-net crocheted, green, wool job you could see right through. He'd fool with his new cherry a little, then take Cathy in and make her clean his office. Have her do it the way he liked, keep those legs real straight and bend from the waist while she dusted so the little short skirt would hike way up there on those silky thighs. Damn. She had a beautiful butt on her, and those legs. Nice stuff on the bitch.

And he'd go over and slip her little bikini pants down and thrust himself right on in there dry. Make her cry out a little. Pinch those beautiful things for love handles and hold on to her while he banged her up against the wall, then pull out and shoot his load in her face the way he enjoyed. Watch that hot, milky juice splatter across the gorgeous sheen of daytime makeup under those eyes like big black spiders. Shoot his hot wad into those pink, wet lips and watch her lick it all off him.

And just as he'd climax he'd be thinking about how the little doped-up slut screamed when he put her eyes out.

Part Two

Spain

Who was this man who sat alone in his well-appointed prison of a home waiting? Waiting when under a different set of circumstances he would have gone after her himself. This was, in truth, no man. On the outside you saw what appeared to be this creature of his own design: one Frank Spain by name. A pair of cold, emotionless, hooded eyes that had long ago mastered the trick of staring, unblinking, into space.

His was a face used to showing nothing. Reflecting nothing out of the ordinary. Visage, bearing, demeanor,