No gold chains. Businessmen or schoolteachers in their short sleeves and ties. No gunfighter mustaches. No long hair. No fat guys. Lean and clean. State roddish. Feds maybe. Very unstreet.
Loose, but not giving him much. All business. Welcome to St. Louis. Nice meeting you. Here's your desk. This is a telephone. Here's how you get outside. This is how you dial on the Intercom system. Here's a directory. This is a map. Very rank conscious. Cool smiles and paperwork. Guys who wanted good paychecks for their good policework. Young career cops on the make.
Eichord wasn't sure what he'd been expecting, but whatever it was, this wasn't quite it. The last place he'd done any temporary duty they'd been worse flakes than the maniacs who were his beloved brethren at Buckhead. Sort of an orderly lunatic asylum. Before that he'd been working out of a metro force so corruption-ridden that it had acquired a national rep. The force was generally conceded to be one of the big three centers for crooked cops on the take. It was a thing that went back sixty, seventy years, back through two and three generations of cop families sometimes — an organic part of The Job. It was so bad there that straight cops could hardly function within the 'pad.'
The pad went all the way to the top, dizzying heights if you were street heat feeding the maw of a machine that reached far beyond the PC and the mayor and right into the black bag that got passed around the state house every week. When a pad is that thick, with tentacles that far-reaching, going right through the judges and prosecutors and county officials and into the legislator's pockets — then you can forget about it.
It was part of a way of life. The pad went way beyond being on the arm for the odd goody-gumdrop. This was going on die take as a CAREER DIRECTION and there were those who went for it the same way street-smart old- timers angled for a certain beat before Knapp hit the NYPD. Eichord knew his share of cops who saw the street as a free lunch for the entrepreneur with savvy. He didn't share their rationale about the payola perquisites, but he'd managed the minor miracle of staying relatively straight in one of the two or three most corruption-ridden shops in the country, without earning any of the pejorative nicknames like Mr. Clean or St. Eichord that would stick to you and haunt your career.
Vic Springer had been cordial in a cold kind of way, but Jack had a solid first impression of the man and he liked him. That was vital. At least that the ostensible cat in charge be somebody who wouldn't bury Eichord in bullshit. He thought Springer looked like a good, hard-nosed straight shooter. A good cop.
What Springer looked like was in fact a caricature of a hound dog. A plug-ugly version of Lyndon Johnson. A sad-eyed basset but photographed by Karsh. A woebegone hound who had one of those faces that wore a perpetual expression of dolorousness. Eichord would soon learn that this was his happy face. In normal repose his countenance registered abject misery. When he was upset, angry, or dejected, his face caved in like a wrecked building. But Eichord knew that faces are only masks.
Jack shook the necessary hands and left to seek appropriate lodging. On the minus side, the cop shop looked like it could be a problem. He'd put on his best PR hat and try to shake it out. The killings seemed so unrelated and, for want of a better word, random he hadn't even begun to comprehend it all. A tough case for Mr. Keen, and impossible for Mr. Eichord. Where the hell was the Falcon when you needed him?
Also on the minus side, he didn't remember a damn thing about the St. Louis of today. Where had Gaslight Square gone to when he wasn't looking? Where would he go to drink his single light beer as he sat at a friendly sidewalk cafe talking with amiable strangers? How would Mr. Crime Crusher find his way around town? What was he doing here? Why me, Lord? he thought.
On the plus side .... he liked the arch.
Forewarned about the St. Louis apartment scene, he'd headed for a motel that advertised you could SLEEP CHEAP under their hospitable roof, and the room smelled like a chemical pine forest where the trees smoked, but the bed looked good. He didn't. He glanced at himself in the mirror as he was hanging up his clothing, trying to see what kind of canine he resembled, and he finally decided a street mongrel. The dark-eyed pound hound glared back in silent reproof.
It had been weeks since Spain had woken bathed in nightmare sweat. The killings in Texas and Florida and across the border had left him serene and calm. He'd been sleeping like a baby of late, sleeping the kind of sleep you get from hard work, good health, peace of mind, and an untroubled conscience. But this time something had been off-key. He'd worked a bit too hard. Gone to bed exhausted. Vulnerable.
He'd fallen asleep fully clothed, bone-weary, and for the first time in many nights a bad dream came and got him again. It was the worst one of all. It began in absolute black with him dreaming he was dreaming, listening to his own loud snores, then seeing something moving in the corner of the darkened bedroom and jerking awake in fear. Did he forget to throw the bolts he'd just installed on the doors? Had someone entered the house while he was sleeping?
A horrible, undefined presence fills him with fear. It moves again. Just a suggestion of an outline moving there in the deep blackness, and he almost screams at the eyes that blink open. Huge yellow eyes glowing brightly as a cat's eyes will appear to reflect light in darkness, but these are electric yellow, piercingly bright, a couple of feet apart. Whatever this thing is, it is huge.
In his heart he knows what has come to get him. This dark, millenarian force that sleeps the sleep of death. Spain's mind feeds him a word he does not know: chilead. He shivers. This evil thing he sees has chosen to wake up in the midst of Spain's dream. And although he cannot see in the darkness he knows its mighty razor claws are clutching a single, amaranthine
The monstrous thing roars to life in an explosion of wind rain light fiber optics rainbows oil slicks fire ice fog hurricane typhoon monsoon tornado tidal wave blizzard intense heat invisible cobwebs catching in the hair and eyelashes a sense of foreign substances being injected down through subdermal layers as the thing's feeders extend out like shoots of lightning stabbing him with surgical precision in his orifices like blinding catheters of death and ... He shudders with the first deft feeding touch that drains his lifeblood in a violent, spasmodic suck. The thing opens its reptile jaws and articulates, 'Well, hello dere.' And it laughs raucously as he feels the thing begin shooting the alien microorganisms back down through the catheters, filling him up with the foul scavengers' anal drippings taken from the bottom of the deepest trench of the blackest vomitorium of hell, fucking him with the devil's sperm scorching him as the thing forces it back down inside him.
The enormous thing moves closer and Spain can see that it is encased in a gelatinous membrane that houses its food and waste sacs. The reptile's skin is pale, dead-looking like a freshly powdered corpse, stretched tightly across a misshapen skull, but brightly colored, with unnatural highlights that suggest an opalescent mutation. Eyes are the color of pus afire.
The long silver tongue appears sanguine, as if a large, garlike fish had been dipped in coagulating blood, and it is forked, barbed, ridged, and extensile, still coated with a recent regurgitation.
Bright wet red on rubidium silver that inflames when the air hits it as the thing articulates, 'Come on now, give us a big kiss,' and roars again in a massive paroxysm of uncontrollable hilarity and vomits up his blood. Spain is drenched in a boiling hot shower of exudate, leukocytes, offal, bloody tissue, and feces. And he wakes up dreaming he is drowning in a Niagara of scalding filth hearing the ancient monster's laughter in the distance, muffled as if underwater as Spain dies hearing the thing's voice say faintly, 'You
And Spain dreams he dies, transfused through vascular nasties by Demogorgon's putrid, poisonous, scorching, deadly coital ejaculate, and boiled in killer fuck.
Eichord was no big whodunit sleuth. Not in his mind. No white knight or blue crime crusher. He saw himself as no better or worse than most of the co-workers. The attitude made for good vibes. So Jack would get along with even the worst and the stupidest and the most corrupt among them if the case demanded it. He was totally into getting The Job done. And he loved the action of Homicide.
MCTF, originally funded to handle unusual major crimes of violence, had been restructured shortly after the Doctor Demented thing, and Eichord found him-self playing a new role — that of a key agent with an elite special unit.
McTuff was more than just another tax-dollared, tunnel vision committee-run hand job. It was federally funded, to be sure, but there similarities ended.
When an agency, local or otherwise, plugged into MCTF it accessed a vast network offering some of the
