in fact going insane. And this beckoning insanity was what the PI saw and what allowed that door to be closed.
The moment the man left, Spain shut off the flow of emotion the way you'd close a faucet. He sat very quietly reading the report again, although he didn't need to do so. Every name, every phrase, every comma, every sentence, was burned into his forebrain, blasted into the cortex forever. Yet he read the report again. And yet a third time. Reading between the lines with the years of insider knowledge that led him down new streets not covered on the pages. He made new, more informed assumptions. Conjecture and theory gave way to the beginnings of his plan. Again, a fourth rereading, this time making notes on a yellow legal pad as he reread the story of his daughter's seduction, abuse, addiction, torture, and degradation. And then, her horror-filled death.
Once again he reads of the fourteen-year-old stranger — this child of his — and the utter and absolute monstrousness of the crimes and inhuman acts committed against her. And once again he follows her trail down to Florida and to Texas, and across the border and into Mexico for her last, screaming, blood-flecked moment of 'stardom' in the blinding, white-hot lights. And as he reads the hand of death touches a burning match to a slow fuse.
He begins his own list. It begins
And the list has many, many names. The list becomes sacred to him. It is his holy quest. Names. An endless list of what he now thinks of as numbers. Numbers he will do. All of them, each as responsible as the next for the death and horrors of his beloved Tiff as surely as if they were the physical perpetrator.
He makes a little shrine of the film canister and it sits on a shelf there in the study, resting like an urn of ashes from the crematorium, tugging at him and spearing his heart and tearing at his mind until he feels himself burst inside.
And Spain sits there feeling himself disintegrate and the pieces going off the deep end, and he carefully draws a line through the name second from the bottom,
He will study the thick dossier until his reddened eyes sting with exhaustion. There are other names he will want to add to his holy list, his private shit list of numbers. Others who will now have to pay with the dearest possible currency, as he has. All of them connected into the network of terror and degradation that conspired to take his family from him, and then to make his daughter's dying a hellish nightmare.
He sees an immediate twist to his plan that will make the joy of what he is about to do all the more rich and delicious. How he savors his taste for the names. And this, the way he will play them against one another, knowing their great weaknesses as he does, this is frosting on the poisonous cake. He must pull himself together, he thinks.
The tears have long dried. But as he reads and makes his notes, his body continues to shake with fury and despair. And he prays for madness to take him now.
'So there I am in my red Santa Claus suit and I got the fake beard on and, shit, an' this little girl comes up with this fox of a mother and I go, Climb up on Santa's lap an' tell him what you want for Christmas. An' when you're done, MOMMY can climb up on Santa's face an' tell him what she wants.'
'Bullshit,' Eichord could hear James Lee telling his partner. 'You ain't got a fuckin' lap. You got a couple of lower fat rolls you might push together — that'd be about it.' Eichord held the phone closer to his ear but then he heard the recorded music again and pulled it away again as he heard Tuny say, 'Might push YOU together and make a fuckin' gook accordion,' and he changed ears with the receiver just as a voice came back on the telephone and gave him the answer to his question.
' 'Preciate it. Thanks. Yep,' he told the phone, 'I will. Thanks again.' So that was it. The last dead end on the paper trail of one Floyd Streicher. Somebody jetting out of LAX just plain didn't exist. He'd run the whole nine yards through MCTF. Everything from motor vehicles to telephone records. He'd run it out for a hundred-mile radius around Metro St. Louis. No such animal. Floyd, he of the hooded eyes — Eichord felt sure — did not exist. So Floyd boarded the TWA flight, but some other wise guy deplaned in St. Louis. So what? Now what?
* * *
The killing came from mysterious and dark energies stockpiled during the long weeks of hibernation and doldrum, at first an expulsion of high-energy flow resulting from a prolonged gestation period and then a shaking of the carbonation in its vacuum-sealed, hermetic skin sack of bubbling, exploding pressures.
At first he could never fully wake up and he slept fourteen sometimes sixteen hours a day. A deep, drugged sleep-coma that hammered him senseless over and over, and he'd crawl back into his nest of dirty bed linens scarcely rumpled from the last sleepathon and with eyes already stinging seek the dark, forgetting comfort of slumber. He slept hard. Mind on hold. His subconscious floating along in the black, timeless oblivion of perpetual night.
Sometimes his bladder would poke him awake and he'd lurch out of his mummy wrappings to pee, eyes half- closed in his prune face as he splashed carelessly over the sides of the commode, staggering back to his unknowing stupor, sound asleep even as his sheet-scarred, wrinkled countenance slammed back down into his beloved, warm nest of covers and unclean bedclothes. Soreness was his alarm clock and discomfort was all that kept him on his feet for seven or eight hours a day.
He never fully awoke. Minimal activity, meals, the mandatory rituals of existence, a sedentary period of staring off into space, then the great weight of it all returning to settle over him like a wet and heavy cloak, weighing him down and forcing him back into his snug, fetal curl within the womb of darkness and collapse.
He sat very still for nearly two days and a night staring with intense concentration at the small can of film as he watched the disaster of his life unfold again and again on the instant replay of his merciless memory. He got up from the chair a few times when his body ached from the motionlessness or from a need to relieve itself, and back in the same seated position to stare some more.
He forgot to drink water for a time and after nearly twenty-four hours his throat had become so raw it was all he could do to swallow.
By the next day he had begun to hear strange things. The noises of the house had become unbearably loud and annoying. He could hear the blood coursing through his veins, and he imagined he could detect arteries beginning to clot and harden. Cells beginning to die. Synapses misfiring. Relays failing. He imagined the machine of his body beginning to self-destruct.
He imagined that the cauliflower of his cerebellum was rotting. His olfactory sense detected the smell of rotting vegetable, and neurons, millions of nerve cells in the hippocampus, attempted to feed the atrophied terminals of the brain's computer. The computer, red-lining on dangerous overload, short-circuited, back-fired, and blew the lights out in his mind.
He fell into a deep, brain-dead sleep. Inert. Torpid. Comatose. Spain no longer dreamed.
When I awake, he thinks, I awaken all atingle. The plan has asserted itself. He awakens remembering all the words to 'Lonely Teardrops' as sung by Jackie Wilson. He is fairly certain he could bench-press 350 pounds. He knows his brain has been totally rewired, and he smells burning leaves, toast with ham and eggs, chocolate cupcakes and cold milk, steak tartare with blood running on the platter, freshly baked bread, Tuborg, a German wine he cannot pronounce, Chanel, newly mown spring bermuda, all of these disparate smells sensed simultaneously as his brain screws its olfactory bulb back into the socket.
He knows he could mentally run the hundred in 9.9, memorize the A-through-C section of Webster's unabridged (AARDVARK: of its genus,
