Stone Shadow

“Bullshit. You just came back from fucking vacation two, what was it—three months ago. You said it bored the stones offa ya.'

“Well—'

“You look like shit. You're drinking too much. You don't get enough sleep. You're hanging around here night and day and you got the social life of a monk with herpes.'

“A monk with herpes? What the hell does that mean?'

“You're drinking again, my man. And it worries me.'

“I'm not drinking one fucking bit more than I always drink.'

“You are half-blitzed on the job, kiddo. Don't bullshit a bullshitter. You stink like a fuckin’ brewery half the time.'

“Christ.” Eichord fought back a smile.

“I'm not jokin’ with ya, man. And everybody's saying stuff about it. I mean the captain—on the Cassarelli thing—he was talkin’ to me one day and you'd been in his face and he goes'—Jimmy Lee fanned a hand over his face—'tell the bartender to cut back on the vermouth, this gin tastes funny.” They both chuckled. “And you know that bar rag, shit Jackson, he's never seen the noon hour without at least two coffee cups of Gordon's under his king-size 56. So when that son of a bitch says you stink of booze you gotta smell like a broken bottle of Fuzzy Navel.'

“I hope I didn't stink as bad as you do right now, you smell like you're wet and on fire.” Eichord turned to fan a hand over his face.

“I hope this pungent cigarette is not the object of your scorn. This doesn't bother you, does it?” Lee said, blowing a huge cloud of poisonous smoke directly at Jack.

“Come on, man,” Eichord said, fanning furiously. “I mean, if you wanna get cancer, that's fine, but don't —'

“This is the smoking section of the room, my man.” James Lee pointed at the crudely lettered sign that hung next to one with the printed legend A-1 DETECTIVE AGENCY, NO JOB TOO SMALL. Someone had penciled out “job” and written “dick.” And someone else had written “eat me.” And another shaky hand had Eichord's cop mind instinctively matching the “eat me” with the printed urinal art in the upstairs men's room, “Want to see a joke, look in your hand,” under which somebody else had scrawled, “Look in BOTH HANDS, you mean.” What flakes.

“You're telling me it is,” Eichord said, feeling sicker by the second. “And if you do that again, I'm gonna puke all over that shitty-looking suit.'

“That is a $350 mohair, Special Agent Eichord, courtesy of Bon Tons. I just flogged it. You like?” He shot his cuffs.

“Wonderful. Too bad they didn't have your size.'

“I got a special deal.” Lee smiled inscrutably.

“Yeah, you boosted the fucker. I don't wanna hear about it.'

“You gotta take something. Buddy Lintz gets pissed. He thinks you don't like him you don't take some threads.'

“Oh, I'm sure Buddy just loves to have coppers flog $350 suits off him. Must make his day.'

“Make my day, mother-fuckers,” a huge man boomed from the stairway. It was fat Dana Tuny, called “Chunk” Tuny throughout Buckhead Station, and the longtime partner of James Lee—known as the legendary homicide team of Chink and Chunk.

“Hay-ZOOS! It stinks like a mother-grabber down here. I gotta get a straight goin’ to cut the smell.” The big detective grabbed a cancer stick out of his partner's pack and lit it with a gold Dunhill, letting out a huge plume of foul carcinogens.

“Morning, asshole,” Lee said to him. “I was just telling Eichord he looked like shit.'

Eichord nodded hello.

“That's no lie, Jack. You look like fuckin’ walking death, man, whatsa matter witcha—you on the sauce again?'

Eichord laughed. “Real subtle, Dana.'

“I just got done tellin’ him, man. He better cut back a couple of quarts a day.'

“Well, girls,” Tuny said, shifting his poundage from his partner's back, “I'm goin’ across the street. You guys want some doughnut holes?'

When he'd gone back up the stairs, Lee said softly to Eichord, “All the ha-ha aside, you do look bad and you are drinking too much, and if I know YOU gotta know, not being the type who kids himself.'

“You can't imagine how much these free consultations help me, Doctor. How long have you practiced? Not counting today.” But underneath the bantering Eichord was well aware of what his longtime friend and colleague was trying to say so subtly: he did look like shit and he wasn't getting enough sleep and he was crankier than he had any reason to be, and the thing was, he was drinking too much and he could feel himself slipping into the big black hole again. Its power was sucking at him, pulling him mercilessly down into the viscid swamp that all alcoholics got to know so well. It was like a club where you had an honorary lifelong membership.

Cassarelli was just a name on a stiff's corpse—the shop name for a case that had ended like so many others, with what Eichord thought of as a tap dance. In this case, a legal tap dance where the victim fed the worms and the bad guys walked. Of course it was never that simple. Nothing was ever simple, clear-cut, open and shut, black and white, dead-bang. Everything had to be a big, complicated, unresolved, dragged-out, mishmash where lawyers and judges grew wealthy on the mind-battering, maddening opaqueness and inequities of turnstile justice.

He had thought more than once that he'd put “tap dancer” on his next 1040 form. Let the fucking IRS chew on that one. That's the way he thought of himself. Tagged as a quasi “serial murder expert,” a misnomer that the press resurrected from time to time whenever media could stir up some numbers with a good, juicy crime story, he was perceived in-house as the ultimate tap dancer. A glorified PR man who could present a public face to media that offered a bit of both worlds, the public-relations stroke job in tandem with a credible body that was actually out there in the trenches.

They used him and he supposed he used the limelight himself, if not for the ego nurturing for the perks of the job that came from the added clout. Grease that could lubricate implacable, rusty cogs of bureaucracy and business. Muscle to open or close doors, wedges, chisels, tools to break loose long-submerged facts in the information log jam. A high profile to draw out a certain kind of potential informant who would be pulled to the aura of celebrity like moths to the candle.

But at what point do you expose so much of yourself to media that your life begins to be a kind of comic book? His endless stories about Dr. Demented, the whacko dentist whom he'd nailed because of a sick junkie informant, and the big case that had taken him from Buckhead Station north to Chicago, the Lonely Hearts murders, he'd talked about all these ancient crimes so often the memories had become illusory and unreal. Had they occurred at all?

“You don't seem to give a shit anymore,” Lee said. You change so much with the years. With the job. His achievements had been talked about so much they'd become little more than blurry postcards, sent back from weird pit stops on his trip through the heart of darkness. Lee was dead wrong. He thought to himself, Shit is all I give, pal.

And it was dragging him down into the depths just like his drowning dream.

“Come on,” he would hear the two boys shout. Even recalling their names from childhood. The Demented Dentist he couldn't recall, but Whortley Williams and Cabrey Brown he remembered forty years later. Go figure it

“Come on, ya sissy.'

“I ain't no sissy.'

“Jack's a sissy. A mama's boy!'

“Yeah, he's too chicken shit to swim out this far. Sissy boy!'

And in his frightening dream Jack would swim out past the pier pilings where his folks had told him never to swim, out there in the water so deep no one had ever touched bottom, out over the black hole that was measured in measureless fathoms, out where little boys had no business.

“What a sissy. Can't even swim underwater,” Cabrey Brown taunted him.

“Can so.'