Frenzy

he ever knew what hit him. Then she decided to kill herself.'

'With the ax?'

'Exactly.'

'Hey. Could I ax you a question?' a cop named Wunderlicht said, and they laughed. 'How can you do it with an ax, slit your belly open?'

'Nope. She took hold of the handle with both hands like so, held it as far out as she could, and goes WWWWHHHHHHHAAAAAAAMMM-MMPPPPP! Right smack dead-center in her forehead. Right between the running lights.'

'Bullshit.'

'I got the fuckin' lab photos if you want to lay a ten on it. Jack. You can see it. She's still got a holt of it, and you can see the skull and that sucker is wedged in the brain real good, like a big ole ripe melon that busted open.'

'This conversation has made me hungry. Let's go get some melons.'

'Seriously, how can you —' And for ten minutes they lost themselves in a discussion of the ax weight, and the best way to hold an ax to kill yourself with it, and on and on like that.

Eichord knew cops. He liked them, too. He knew what made them tick. Why they were there and what it took to keep you sane on The Job. This kind of talk was just blowing off steam. It was a way to say. This dirt I live in, this filth that I work in, it's not real. It doesn't really touch me. It doesn't exist. Just words. At least this was the way he looked at it.

He listened to another cop, Pat Skully, talking about the time back when he was a narc and they raided a house and dead babies were everywhere. It was the worst he'd ever seen and there was no joking during the story. Two dealers had beat the cops to the pad, which was a shooting gallery for hypes. The woman who ran the house had four little kids ranging from a newborn baby to about six or so in age. When the narcs found them the dealers had killed all of them in a rage. The babies were flattened. As Skully started telling how it had been done, Eichord got up quietly and unobtrusively left the room.

Bud Leech caught him down on the street.

'Let's catch a buzz,' Eichord said.

'Why not?' And they went in the nearest tavern and tilted a cold one each.

'The funniest thing about Rikla, you know, giving himself up today. I know this pervert from way back. I go back to when I was working in a little hick community and hearing horror stories about how Mr. G. ran St. Louis, an' these St. Louis ad vice guys were telling me all about this dude named Paul Rikla who was a chickenfucker. And I told them, You mean he liked little boys, like a chickenhawk. No, he liked fucking chickens.

'He had priors going back to this time they answered a disturbance call about some perv waggin' his wienie in this residential neighborhood. Man in a car nude, they hear. They investigate and there's this Coupe De Ville parked there, and the cops go up to it and shine the light in, and out of the Caddy hops Rikla, stone mother naked and carrying a butcher knife all covered in blood. This is a true story, by the way. He looked like he wanted to be shot real bad and he almost got his wish 'cause they damn near popped a cap on him when they saw him like that.

'Inside the car was the rest of the story. He has this beautiful young Syrian daughter, and she was with him in the front seat of the car, and the vehicle is covered in blood and feathers. Rikla would slice the head off of a chicken and daughter would take and jam the fowl's severed windpipe down on Daddy's cock-a-doodle-doo, and the headless bird would flop and bop him off.'

'I —' Eichord started laughing before he could get it out.

'I swear, man. If I'm lyin' I'm dyin'.'

'Oi. It's been a long day. Let's go get somethin' to eat and get outta here,' he said, draining the last of his Light.

'Okay. Where you wanna eat?'

'Colonel Sanders?'

Eichord liked Bud Leech a lot. He was good people. Jack could imagine how much the incident of the lost tail would goad Leech every time he thought about it. He was a good cop and it could have happened to anybody. What Eichord didn't know was that very soon Bud Leech would acquit himself of his great sin.

But Jack's thoughts kept returning to that teaser from the very frightened Mr. Rikla. The 'bullshit' story about a chief enforcer waging his own solitary vendetta. His SEE NO EVIL brainstorming and hunch-playing finally had the vestiges of a motive to chew on. One superkiller. What if they were dealing with a mad enforcer on a rampage?

They were on their way to chow and picked up the call on the two-way. Eichord knew what it was before he heard the word Russo in the clear. Multiple-shooting fatality. One male, two female Caucs down. Christ. The house had been under 'loose surveillance,' which meant that once an hour or so a scout car would slowly roll by, what they call a 'boogie man.' Wonderful.

Eichord knew he'd find Angelina and her mother dead. All the way out there be thought about the unpunished crimes. The crimes committed every day by land barons, police officials, network executives, union bosses, TV evangelists, petrochemical tycoons, political figureheads, automakers, commercial mavens — all the dirty, mendacious hypocrisy. The bush-wacking, degenerate, back-shooting no-good bullshit that people get away with. It kept his head busy till they got to the crime scene.

The killer had massacred the bodyguard, the maid, and Rosemarie Russo. No sign of forced entry. No sign of Angelina Russo.

A news reporter had phoned the archdiocese to inquire about the state of health of Auxiliary Bishop O'Consky, and while he was on the phone and they were chatting he happened to comment about the terrible thing — how awful for the lovely Russo family — he was a personal friend, and with James and Phillip taken like that, sure 'n' it would be so hard on the rest of the family. And the newsman seemed so unusually solicitous, the man on the other end told him how there was a special service being planned, and one thing led to another, and in the course of the conversation the caller discovered that the bishop had never actually met any of the Russo family, and one thing and another.

So when the bishop himself called from the archdiocese to inquire if he might come 'round tomorrow just to pay his respects to the Russo family, and give them some mementos of the deceased, also to show them some material that had been donated to the Cardinal Glennon College Seminary School, of course he'd be welcomed in and greeted by the grieving survivors, Mother and Daughter Russo.

'Dominus vobiscum,' the good bishop whispered, crossing himself in his own special way as he made his way up the steps.

'Et cum spiritu —'

A passing motorist might have observed the bishop himself helping the exhausted and grief-stricken Angelina Russo down the steps and into a waiting vehicle. Ominous vobiscum.

Angelina, now hog-tied, gagged, blindfolded, weeping silently on the floor of the back seat, would be the next visitor to learn of the peculiarities of Spain's house. They traveled down a long, winding gravel road. The house was located on four lonely wooden acres.

Following the road, rather indifferently maintained county gravel, one reaches the end of the county's responsibilities. Winding past a small family cemetery with its overgrown headstones and massive, horrifying ironies, an old graveyard beginning to push up remnants of the long dead. Past the weed-choked graves in dark, deep thickets, where old bones are working their way toward the surface.

The last hundred yards of this dirt road becomes a mudhole in heavy rain. You want to make certain you're never caught out on this road in a rainstorm because should your vehicle bog down and you go to the nearest house for help, your gracious host may prove unpredictable. He might be witty, urbane, even comforting. All the amenities of telephone, warm fire, even a libation, might be offered.

The next few minutes might be uneventful. Simply a pleasant, comforting respite from the elements while you waited for a taxi or a tow truck or a friend. And then again, there could be minutes that would drag like days. Minutes that would plunge you down into an unspeakable world of sudden and exquisite pain. Because your host is two, very different, wildly unpredictable men.

Both of the men who call themselves Spain kill. But the second Spain, the one whose madness has taken him