Frenzy

middling cop work.

Eichord liked them. Especially Jimmie Lee, with whom he'd been close friends for as long as he'd been a cop. He could hear them banter back and forth as the woman was droning on about the plastic scam in his right ear. One of them saying to the other, 'She only lets you go down on her 'cause you got a face like a douche bag.' They'd lasted together for so many years. Longer than most marriages.

'... is not the same story we got at all . . . ' His brain kicked back in for a second as the woman's voice grated in his ear. An employee from one of the credit-card outfits hassling him about something that was tied to a junkie-related homicide. He glanced up at the wall clock. Smack dab in the middle of the clock face was the tiny printed message 'Eatin' Ain't Cheatin'.' He managed to get off the phone and they started in on him.

'Hey, the captain's in now,' fat Dana said as soon as he hung up the phone.

'Uh-huh.' He waited.

'The captain? Did someone ask about the captain?' Lee said with great excitement. 'Captain Furillo?'

'Sorry,' Tuny said. 'Furillo's out with AIDS today, Mick. I'm in charge.'

'You, Lieutenant Butt?'

'It's Buntz! You dork-brained little peterface.' He straightened his tie like the guy on TV did.

'Grrrrrrrrrrrrrr,' Lee snarled menacingly.

'Get hold of yourself, Rinty.'

'Watch it. Puke Breath.'

'Hey. No way to talk in front of Mizzzzzzz Davenport here.'

'Good morning. Detectives,' Lee chirped in his best falsetto.

'That's good morning, Detective Lootenant, you titless tramp. That no-dick, cold-fish husband of yours ain't here ta proteck ya.'

'Listen, Craterface, or Inspector General Zitz, or whatever your freaking name is,' Lee squeaked, 'when my husband Furillo gets back he'll have your ugly ass up on charges for this gross insubordination.'

'Yeah? I'll have you up on ole Pork Mountain in a minute, Mizzzzzzzzzzzzz Daybed, now haul your skinny ass outta here.'

'Sounds good to me,' Eichord said, getting up with an audible sigh.

'Oh, don't go away mad,' Lee screeched, still in falsetto.

'Two minutes to nine and you maniacs have got me tired already. You wear a person down with that shit.'

'You know. Jack,' Tuny said, 'I wasn't going to say this. But you have a right to know.'

'Mmmm?' Eichord said, turning as he started out the door and arching an eyebrow.

'Yeah. We weren't going to tell you. Some of the guys are saying you might be a latent heterosexual.'

'Absolutely,' he said, turning back. 'I guess I can come out of the closet now.' He started upstairs.

'Coming in the closet is how they caught on to you in the first place,' Tuny told his back.

The pretty girl sitting beside the first-floor dispatcher looked up at him as he mouthed a Hi and she pantomimed a kiss at him as she spoke into a headset contraption. He gestured with a thumb in the general direction of their fearless leader and she nodded. He winked goodbye.

He knocked on the open door as he went in. ''Morning, Captain,' he said to the huge, red-faced man behind the desk, who grunted at him without looking up and said,

'YOU look like shit on a stick this morning.'

Eichord thought of one or two rejoinders as he eyed the bulging girth threatening to pop the buttons on the man's shirtfront, but he smiled and said, 'I need a vacation.'

'You just had a fucking vacation.'

'You call that circle jerk in California a vacation? I call it a sentence.'

'Well, you invincible crime-crushers have a tough time.'

'Gimmee a break. Cap.'

'You wanna break? You need another vacation? You got it.' He slid a Task Force envelope across the desk. 'Forthwith.'

Eichord went through the motions of opening it and chatting briefly about the summons to St. Louis, even though in fact he had initiated it himself. He was going up there to see if he could fit SEE NO EVIL into the recent St. Louis mob hits. Different MOs than the L.A. EYEBALL work, but the elusive Mr. Streicher was a burr under the saddle.

As soon as he could do so he extricated himself from the captain's presence. In the entire time he'd been in the office the captain had never looked up at him. There was no love lost between them. Eichord didn't respect the man much, and he supposed that it showed. The honcho made no bones about the way he felt about Eichord. Jack was a drunken bum of a prima donna who would have been booted off the force years ago but for the intervention of the McTuff people and the efforts of his rowdy friends Lee and Tuny who had so often rebuilt the bridges he'd fried so hard to burn.

Eichord wasn't disturbed by their relationship. He figured he would have probably felt the same way had their positions been reversed. Everybody from Jack's 'rabbi' down knew that the captain was Eichord's superior only in the most nominal sense. Jack served only one master: the Major Crimes Task Force.

Jack Eichord at least knew he was no invincible crime-crusher. He was just another plodding, sweating, paper-shuffling, workmanlike flatfoot. One more booze-battered copper whose butt was growing larger by the day and who had a gray hair for every city he'd ever been in. Somebody whose true cop value fell right in between the extremes of 'Eminence Grise of Serial Murder Experts' (Criminology Magazine) and 'shit on a stick.'

When he finished cleaning up after the things in Florida, Frank Spain headed cross-country for Texas, and days of long driving later, he was crossing over into May-hee-co, passing a billboard advertising a TV show or a beverage or something that said, VIVIR UN POCO. It was the first time he'd smiled in a long time, and he muttered out loud, 'Abso-goddamn-lutely,' when he saw it.

He'd had all that boring, flatlands driving to plan. To chum all the names and the people together and blend the mix in his head. He understood the organization better than most. Ciprioni, his treacherous mentor, had seen to that.

When Spain was a kid, first working as a mob gofer, still a youngster who they looked on as somebody to cultivate, Ciprioni had pulled his coat to the inevitability of the Dago family's rise and fall. 'You won't have to worry about nothin'. I'm going straight up. The Man — he's going to the very top. But these people here' — he meant the other St. Louis family, the ones down the ladder from the big Chicago mob, not to mention Kansas City —'they gonna fall apart when the old mangoes.'

The Man, a name he always spoke with reverent emphasis, was his — not just patriarchal godfather but everyone's — spiritual leader. More than the bosses' boss. He was the force that held it together. As far removed from the Dagatina family as America was from the old country. With Tony Gee gone. Sally Dago would be just one more insignificant hood trying to run a crumbling empire.

So much had happened over the years. Sally finally went away behind a racketeering/extortion thing and was still inside. But Spain would figure a way to bring him down too. And that fucking Ciprioni as well. No one was invulnerable — history had proved that enough times.

Sally Dago's people had been a mixed lot, Italians, Sicilians, and mostly Syrians. The two main factions could be played against each other. As Spain drove, he formulated his plan. The way he would take the small fry off first. He'd whack one on either side — figure it out just right — the people would have to be strategically placed just so to make it look like the people 'across the street' were making a move of some kind. If he did it right, worked carefully, kept his emotions in check, he could start a fucking gang war.

He stopped and used a telephone, calling someone whose name had appeared in a sidebar of the main dossier.

'Hello.'

'Yeah?'

'I'm calling from L.A., can you hear me awright?'