“A. C. Wiegrath, please,” the voice tells the woman over the telephone.
“May I tell him who's calling, please?'
“SAC Krug at the Bureau.'
“Oh—yes, sir—just a moment, please.” The line goes click and there is a momentary pause and he hears the familiar voice answer.
“'Morning, Howard.'
“Arthur.'
“You get a chance to go to school on my memo?'
“Yeah, I did. I pretty much think we need to push on with this. I see what you're saying but we're getting boxed in with the investigation if we don't move.'
“Well'—the man's raised eyebrows and shrug could be heard over the telephone in his tone and the sigh —'you know the sit-chee-ashun as well as I do. You're on eggshells. Something like this. I think you have to do what you think best. Buck stops with you.'
“Yeah. Well, we got only three possibilities. First Mr. Fields hisself, which doesn't make much sense—guy can buy anything he wants now—Christ, djew look at his financial statement?'
“No, I didn't. He's got a few?'
“Yeah, you could say that.” They chuckled. “For a rainy day. You can say the boy Monroe put it in a cigar box and buried it. I guess we can't dismiss it.'
“What'd the poly do?'
“Shit,” he said contemptuously.
“I figured.'
“We took about forty man-hours combined with that damn videotape. He looks awful good for it. He's in there in a shot one minute, he's outta the shot the next minute.'
“Christ almighty, I think...” He trailed off.
“Arthur, if there was ANYbody else looked ripe for it I wouldn't press it. I mean the girl. Shit there's no way. Just no opportunity. The video narrows it down by eliminating everybody else including the two uniform guys. I think we're lookin’ at Fields, John Monroe, and the investigating officer in charge. That's it.'
“Detective Sergeant James Lee out of Buckhead Station.'
“Yeah.” Long pause.
“I think we got to get a court order and the whole shootin’ match.'
“Lee's telephone. Fields’ telephone. What else?'
“All the usual. For now. Then we'll just wait and see what drops out of the trees, I guess.'
“Jesus. You know, for a measly damn twelve, insured at that, you know what
“Hey, really. Amen to that. It just don't work that way.'
“I know, I know. Okay. I'll put it in the works.'
“Thanks, Arthur.'
“No problem. Get back to you after a while.'
“Right,” Special Agent-in-Charge Krug said, hanging up the phone.
The man sitting on the other side of the desk from him anticipated what Krug was about to say and said, “I can appreciate how he feels. We don't like it much either.'
“Right.'
“But we both know we got a dirty cop here.'
“Looks that way, I'll admit.'
“Yep.'
He had always counted on his surprising quickness and it had never failed him. He was amazingly surefooted until he grew tired, and his unexpected speed and agility had surprised more than one adversary to death. Daniel had always been careful about revealing his secret quickness of movement, even in combat, and he regarded it as a special, delicious treasure quite rightfully.
But while he could sprint fifty, sixty, seventy-five feet with dazzling speed for his obvious corpulence he was then dead in the water. Running more than a few city blocks, even at a slow jog, was impossible and to him unthinkable. What would be the point? Stamina has its limits.
He knew himself the way you know a reliable machine, every tolerance, every interrelated movement within the system, and his capacities and limitations were known, calculated, and trusted. First his wind would give out, then if he kept going—his ankle would pain him—and soon he'd be moving like a wounded hippo, favoring the bad ankle and moving in a kind of half-lurching half-waddling plunge forward, almost out of control, and uncharacteristically vulnerable as he gulped in mighty lungfuls of air. It was worse than if he'd remained in place and fought, or hid, or whatever. So of course he never ran.
Now he had to run. He had to do it all—the whole aching, killing, hurt-filled, boring, lonely, frustrating, play- through-the-pain program designed to tire him to the point where he wouldn't eat. To make him sleep on a huge, screamingly hungry gut that demanded attention as it shrunk. What was his speed? Could he run the forty in 4.4? The hundred in 14.4? He hadn't a remote clue. He decided not to buy a stopwatch, as he could count up to sixty minutes by the second and not be more than four seconds off either way. Hell, he WAS a clock.
So he bit the bullet and did it. He'd pull off his huge shirt and, Ace bandage carefully wrapped around the right ankle, take off at a quick double-time toward the nearest ditch. At first he could only run one way—but slowly, day by day, he'd run a little farther before he gave out, exhausted, collapsing in a wheezing, beached-whale heap wherever he fell, gasping for air, his ankle throbbing with pain to which he would steel himself. His heart would be threatening to burst through the enormous, meaty-tittied chest, and he'd be angrier, at that moment, then he could ever remember being when the hot and red waves of kill fury were not present.
Finally he'd manage to get back to his feet, and—still fighting for air—he would gamely walk back to the shack, the soaked towel in his huge hands. It was then, on each of the trips back from the edge of Hora's property line, he would take the soaked bath towel and wring it. Jesus Christ wring it dry and then the hands would grip it like it was a human throat and they would wind the towel tighter and tighter, testing the strength of those mighty, powerful shoulders, back muscles, neck, upper arms, forearms, wrists, and killer hands as he pulled at the towel ripping the jawbone of a man loose or tearing the head from a woman or spear-thrusting into the solar plexus and coming up under the rib cage and forcing the fingers under the lower ribs and pulling with all his might. Do you know what power it takes to pull a human rib cage apart you spineless, pencil-necks in your safe, happy worlds of calm and poise and freedom? Do you know the will the concentration required to force the thumbs in behind the eyes and pop them out like so do you know the force it takes to rip a heart out with your hands?
Oh, he hated them all so. Hated their smiling faces and their foolish, sheep ways and their lives that seemed to mock him just by their mere existence.
Sissy knew instinctively that she must communicate something to this quiet and excitingly dangerous new man in her life. She wanted him to understand that his violent nature was quite acceptable to her. She was no stranger to violent men. She didn't mind a big, strong sugar daddy looking out for her. It was reassuring. So this became the hazy focus of her running commentary.
Chaingang hears fragments from a long, disjointed story about a guy she was with named Toby Something, and a rambling, pointless anecdote about a gun and his mind tunes in momentarily as she tells him, “...picked it up and pulled the trigger, and I didn't know, you know, it was loaded, and the gun went off. I was real close to him,
