'Where's, uh —' Oh, Christ in His Heaven, now I can't think of his name. Finally it came to him. 'Where's Duke? Is he in population?' His voice was thin and raspy.
'No, sir,' the voice rumbled like gravel loose in a metal pan. 'I 'tink Duke's down in Ad Seg.'
The old man nodded. 'Get him.' And the large shadow moved.
A few minutes later there were footsteps and two men entered his room.
'Siddown,' he said to the man after they gave each other the formal greeting of respect.
'Duke' — he slid the paper across the table — 'I want the word out. Enough is enough. The next one who violates this thing of ours, the next — outlaw — that's it. He goes under. Give it to Big Mike Stricoti and Jack Nails. Tell them to get their own crew. Whoever it is. I want that shit clipped.'
Spain sleeps. And in a sleep of death this man to whom control is so all important dreams that all control is lost.
A cloaked finger approaches from the shadows of the dream and a skeletal, clawed hand emerges from the folds of the dark cloak, tossing ancient bones from a skull cup.
The secret oracle gazes at the bones and foretells of sudden and violent occurrence.
Somewhere in the Orient a sage writes of myriad straw dogs, and high on a mountaintop an aged holy man pierces a veil of understanding.
A secret society prepares a virgin for ritual slaughter. Spain sees that it is his daughter.
A once-sentient mind now begins to recede into a dark, inner chamber where sense, impression, and response cannot penetrate. A bioelectrical circuit breaker is thrown. The chamber goes to black.
The dreamer lifts a hammered goblet that once held the blood of Christ, and drinks deeply of serpent venom. He sees the fissures of his brain transubstantiated into a nest of writhing eels.
The cold, inky force of the nightmare pulls him down, and two hundred fathoms below the surface he is held in a powerful, swirling whirlpool.
He dreams of giant sea snakes and mutant water scorpions and eyeless, slithering things that come to transfuse him again with devil-filth, and the oracle tells him he will return to the surface world to do murder by skill and magic. And he spirals up through the black, rushing helix at the command
'Expunge!'
The following day Spain rested. And the following night he made a totally random kill. Parking a stolen car out in front of the Robert Schindler Building across from the Press Club, a few blocks from police headquarters, walking in and looking at some names on a rubber nameplate thing by the elevator. And when the elevator man came over to him and asked him if he could help him, something in the man's tone, his pigmentation, sent Spain into a fury and without warning or a hint of premeditation (yet he had stolen a car), he pulled Mary Pat from her sheath taped to his left forearm and stabbed the diminutive elevator operator/doorman to death there in the lobby of the Schindler Building.
Back home and safely ensconced in the rental house he was busily remodeling to suit his bizarre and terrifying needs, he played with Pat, tossing the nine-inch stiletto into the soft wood of the table where it stuck again and again. He had read Leslie Charteris as a boy and remembered the dagger that The Saint had named after a woman — Anna, was it? And he named this deadly bitch after his wife and gave her blood to drink.
The stiletto stuck in the soft pine again, the cruciform silhouette casting its shadow along the tabletop. The appearance was exactly that of a crucifix, the shaft and guard making the sign of the cross, the grooves and relief work of the turned metal grip suggesting the crucified body of the Savior.
He took the thing and flung it with a vengeance across the room from him, hurling it by the point, throwing it with that practiced movement of the arm that he had developed over two decades throwing every type of knife — dagger, dirk, screwdriver, sharpened pencil, all manner of pointed and edged objects — and Pat bit into the wall with a comforting thwocking sound as the shadow of the cruciform fell against the wall, suggesting someone who had been crucified upside down and Spain set there staring at the stiletto in his wall, feeling a chill touch him there in the very warm, empty house. And Spain was now mad as a hatter. And he sat there quietly gritting his teeth, thinking about how good it was to stab the elevator operator whose tone of voice and coloration evoked the image of Gaetano Ciprioni. But he knew he would retain the professional control necessary to achieve his ultimate goal. That degree of controlled resolve would not desert him in his madness. Killing, after all, was what he did.
For three days Jack Eichord had been tied up with the flood of violence and then he had time to breathe and he called Rita.
'I've missed you desperately,' she told him, and all he could do was breathe into the phone.
'I know, you've missed me too. I can tell by the way you're panting.'
'Yeah,' he told her very seriously.
'What is happening here?' she asked him.
'What?'
'What's happening to us?'
'What do you mean?'
'You know what I mean, you rascal you.'
'Oh, you mean
'Yes. That.'
'It's a biological phenom that I've read about in books. It's quite natural.'
'Oh, that's good, then.'
'It's very good, in fact.'
'Does it have a name?'
'Yes, it thurtently doth,' he said, sounding for some inane reason like a cat in the cartoons. 'It means we're falling in sex.'
'How romantic.'
'Would you like a little romance tonight?'
'I could probably squeeze you into my busy schedule.'
'Squeeze me about seven, say?'
'Consider yourself squeezed.'
'I've missed you too. A lot.'
Even better the second time? he asked himself afterward. No way. But it had been. So wonderful. They lay there laughing like fools, so pleased with each other and the nice discoveries. She fingered his second belly button, a puckered navel where an old wound had eventually smoothed over.
'You've led an interesting life, I see.'
'Unquestionably, my dear Watson.'
'What made this? Did someone bite you here?' She touched its indentation.
'Probably.' He said as he felt the small groove that was a long, forgotten souvenir from a blocked Fairbairn thrust. 'Ancient history.'
'I feel sure it must be from a woman. A bite.'
They sought each other's mouths and her tongue zapped him like the touch of a high-voltage line and he was copper winding down to a long, coiled grounding shaft that took the power hungrily and fed on it and he reached deeply to take as much of her hot, sweet lightning as he could, letting the energy of the electricity charge them in a crackling surge of current.
'Who is it?' Eichord said to Bud Leech, who was already on the crime scene.
'Little joker named Betters. They really played Hurt You with this boy. Hope you've had dinner already.'
'Hey, Bud,' one of the Homicide people said to Leech, nodding to Eichord.
'Yo.'
'Can they take him?'
'Uh, hold it. Not yet, babe. Tell 'em hold it a few minutes.'
'Okay.'
'Small time jive-ass little punk named Vinnie Betters. Some gofer in with Measure.' He shook his head. 'I don't know what this is about,' he said, jerking his thumb toward the kitchen on the word 'this.'
