Iceman Read online

  Iceman

  Rex Miller

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  Copyright ©Rex Miller, 1990

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  "Wouldn't it be nice to be the iceman and never make a mistake?"

  —Vice President George Bush

  "Here are the rules:

  there are no rules."

  —EICHORD

  Buckhead Springs

  Buckhead Medical Park

  New Mexico

  Amarillo, 1948

  Blytheville, Arkansas

  Buckhead Station

  Vega, 1955

  South Blytheville, Arkansas

  North Buckhead

  Vega, 1961

  South Blytheville, Arkansas

  Buckhead

  Vega, 1964

  Buckhead Springs

  Vega, 1965

  Buckhead

  Buckhead Station

  Las Vegas, 1985

  Buckhead Station

  North Buckhead

  Buckhead Station

  Moss Grove

  Buckhead Station

  North Buckhead

  Buckhead Springs

  Texas

  Amarillo

  Las Vegas

  Metro

  Television Park

  Las Vegas

  Buckhead Station

  North Buckhead

  Buckhead Springs

  Buckhead Station

  North Buckhead

  Buckhead Station

  Buckhead Springs

  Buckhead Station

  Buckhead

  Mission

  Buckhead Station

  North Buckhead

  Buckhead Medical Park

  Buckhead Station

  North Buckhead

  Buckhead Springs

  9 Days Later

  16 Days Later

  27 DAYS LATER...Mount Olive

  Buckhead Station

  Buckhead Medical Park

  North Buckhead

  Buckhead Springs

  Buckhead Springs

  He suffers from disjunction of the function. A monstrous thing from his past nightmares materializes and smiles hello.

  “I've got a secret,” the thing oozes teasingly. Teases oozingly.

  “What?” he tries to say, but only dead grotto air exhales and there is no discernible sound. The monster's face is barklike, the tree-trunk neck sprouting from a foliose torso that parts and a second head pops out of the leaves saying, “Hello, bitch."

  It is the face of a woman he has known. The turmoil and dust of an ancient investigation paralyzes his heart momentarily. Supine, in more ways than one, he spasms erect, his body caught in a paroxysm like a sneeze. But instead of achoo. Jack Eichord goes, “Say what?"

  “You fucking bitch,” she says, and he recognizes the puffy bloat that is the monster's lower head.

  “Huh,” he says in a weak stall for time. She was named Myrtle or Mildred or Minnie, one of the old-time names, and her last name was a state. Myrtle California. Myrtle Iowa. Minnie Minnesota. Myrtle Beach Florida. Mildred, that was it—her name was Mildred Florida, pronounced Mildred Flo-REE-duh.

  “Fucking cunt,” the face in the leaves says with a puffy snarl. Reverse-angle shot. Mildred Florida pokes her fat face out of the foliage and sees that banana-skin twat who won't leave her live-in boyfriend alone, and she decides to get the thing right and do it right then and she steps out on hard, sunny pavement. Intercut sequence. Eichord is taking the story at the crime scene. A man is describing what he saw out in front of the Silver Dollar Saloon.

  “Mildred Florida come out an’ she was drunker'n a fuckin’ bag of skunks and she seen Lola and says, ‘you fucking bitch fucking cunt I'll keep your eyes off him,'” and the hard, bright thing in her hand slashes and silver takes red and steel slices yellow, the high yellow flesh of Lola Somebody, and whatever Lola wants, but not this not a slash that takes the eye and leaves it hanging by an obscene thing, hanging out of the socket for all to see for the eye to see, keep an eye out and all those old lines, but signals zap out of the brain and a hand reaches into the purse for hardware.

  The hot sunlight is real as summer noon, baking the cracked gray sidewalk. Mildred FlorEEEEEEda, heavy but still womanly, shapely gone to pork in a bright-red dress, banana-skin Lola dark Peach Blossom King Kink Straightener slick, smelling of creams and lotions, lipstick red down the front of the off-the-shoulder dress and coagulating in ugly streaks across the gray concrete.

  “—an’ she cuts Lola with a straight edge,” that's straight razor to you, my man. Cheap, sharp blade in a little plastic handle, flip, slap, slash. Fast. The eye is out. Good moves, just right up to the bitch and a hard cut, aiming for her eyes and getting one in fact. Now cut the cunt's lying throat and shut her bitch mouth up once and for all. But before the puffy-faced woman in the red dress and breathe-easies can get her drunken ass together and swing that old, doughy fat-muscled arm out again for another cut Lola makes a noise sort of like, “Waaaaaaaaaugh!” and her purse hardware goes off, shooting her assailant right dead-center in her bulge of a gut, the brass kicking back against the window of the bar and rolling into the gutter as Lola steps up bleeding red onto red and shoves the little chrome SNS into the bloated face and fires a round right between the teeth—teach you to cut ME you ugly old mound of dogshit. BOOM. More brass and gunsmoke and blood all over the fucking place. Entrance hole inside Mildred Florida's mouth about the size of a big chigger bite. Exit wound a different story.

  “Old douchebag CUT me I'm BLINDED,” Banana Skin says.

  Eichord, troubled, has that sensation of discomfort that comes from a nudging and nameless dread. A beckoning thing that hides behind a corner of his sleeping mind calls in a mean whisper.

  “Say what?” he says. Speak up, goddammit.

  “'Ole douchebag CUT me I'm BLINDED,’ the girl Lola says and sits down in the pool of blood holding her bloody eye socket, an’ she's cussin’ and cryin’ an’ she's still got that little pistol inner hand when you guys get here.” You guys are the constabulary. The beckoning whisper again.

  “Huh?"

  “Your turn next time,” the voice says.

  Jack Eichord's soul fills with fear now. “'Zat right?” he says in a cracked growl. But he understands. The bad one is out there in the dark somewhere hiding in the shadows. In Tulsa, or Terre Haute, or Tampa. Urban ghetto blaster. Hardrock boonies ridge-runner. City sidewinder. Outlaw night-rider in a desolate line shack. Heart of the city player waiting for him in the glare of the nightlife. A crazy waiting to put an end to it with a twenty-five-dollar loan-shop pipe.

  “Hello, bitch,” she may say, quiet, seething anger coming to a boil. And Calvin Colorado or Ella Mae Maine will pull out some awful little pain-producer and put his lights out. Eichord hopes to spare himself the description of the sound of the gunshot, or the fearsome pain of the lead projectile, the terrorizing moments when you look down and go, “Oh, shit, I'm shot.” The moments when the blood that belongs to you geysers out in a hot, stinking, frightening gush of coppery anguish and you pray to your God the hospital is close at hand and God let me live don't do this I'm not ready to say good-bye yet and somehow he wrenches his mind away from the Silve
r Dollar Saloon and the blood-flecked sign out in front selling Buffalo Lager—50 cents. And he's escaped her one more time.

  He flails his way out of the hot covers and sits on the edge of the bed and looks over at Donna and coughs into a tissue and goes into the bathroom and runs cold water and washes his sweat-covered face and neck and hopes, as he always hopes for the first few seconds upon awakening, that none of it will have happened. That the Arkansas horror story was only a nightmare. That if it wasn't a bad dream, then Eichord hooked him in tune. That he, Jack Eichord, is everything his bosses claim he is, and that he strutted into Blytheville, wrapped it in eight seconds, and that—just like in the movies—the good guys always win.

  But it wasn't a nightmare. It really happened and he remembers it all and he sees the eye. Watching him like the eye atop the pyramid on the back of the dollar bill. And that brings him back to the other case, the icepick murders—the latest unsolvable horror in a life that has become a veritable smorgasbord of awful terrors Eichord must confront; a buffet of foulness and nasty surprises, and the moment the image registers he jerks his mind fully awake before the silver tray of shit canapés and penis sausages intrudes to paralyze him yet again.

  He hurries to little Jonathan's room to make sure the boy has not suffocated in his sleep. To make certain no other nameless terrors have befallen the child, sensing the chill of some envenoming presence even as he quietly turns the doorknob. And Eichord opens the door, taking his first deep, normal breath since waking as he stares into the darkness.

  Buckhead Medical Park

  The glass of the doctor's window was a barrier between his spotless office and the clutter and stink of what lay beyond. It sealed out the breeze carrying a mixed scent of urban fumes and country smoke, as transportation stench and burnt fields commingled and stirred together. It had not rained for a long time and the roadside foliage had turned a dry, parched, brittle brown where the ground had gone too long without moisture. Tap roots strained down, probing the earth for life-giving water. The once-rich farmland was beginning to crack open. Things were still alive and from the distance there was the appearance of normalcy, but up close you could see they were dying.

  The man looking out the window turned from the depressingly barren landscape, speaking to his patient seated on the other side of the immense, hand-carved desk.

  “The mind is the most powerful medicine there is. It can heal. It can cure."

  There was a pause and the man in the chair said, very seriously, “Would you like to know what I believe, Doctor? What I REALLY believe?"

  “Certainly,” the doctor said with sincerity.

  “I believe that one day a hole will open in the sky and that somehow, miraculously, Shirley MacLaine shall be revealed to me. I believe that I never, to paraphrase Will Rogers, met a woman named Shirley I didn't like. I believe in the mystical significance of names. Think how many funny comedians are named Richard: Pryor, Belzer, Lewis, just to name three. I believe that the names Shirley and Richard each contain seven letters as do Lincoln and Kennedy. I believe that John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald each contain—"

  “Please,” the doctor said gently, “I'm only trying to—"

  “i wasn't fucking through goddamn you NEVER fucking interrupt me,” and then laughing to show he was just kidding, realizing that he had alarmed the good doctor and adjusting his face to its least frightening clown mask and becoming in that next quarter-second a scowling, jowly, pouting Nixon, saying, “Just as I told Kissinger at one of our prayer breakfasts, the mind is powerful medicine. It CAN heal. It CAN cure. Say, Henry, do you think I should burn the tapes?"

  The doctor laughed heartily in appreciation and the evil and dangerous man across the desk mugged, rolled his eyes, and waved victory signs with each hand. Quite the court jester, this killer.

  New Mexico

  The day was picture-perfect and cottony billows made fanciful shapes against the blue sky. The sun shone down on the cliffs, warming the rocks underfoot, and the old man smiled, looking down at his brethren gathered before him.

  “I am eager to preach gospel to you,” he said to them in his loud, pulpit voice. “For I am not ashamed of the gospel. The righteous shall live by faith.” Some of them clearly understood. Others would not immediately meet his eyes. But he knew this was always the way.

  “For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes. His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse.” He stepped down onto the next plateau of huge, flat rocks, where a few of them watched him. His fierce eyes probed his congregation for backsliders and heathens.

  “For even though they knew God, they did not honor Him as God, or give thanks; but they became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened.” He moved down among them, gingerly stepping down onto the next slab of rock. It was a fine turnout today. He supposed fifty to sixty of them had showed up.

  “Professing to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures.” He walked among the congregation without fear. A righteous man of the gospel.

  “Therefore God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, that their bodies might be dishonored among them.” His voice grew louder.

  “For they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen.

  “For this reason God gave them over to degrading passions, for their women exchanged the natural function for that which is unnatural.

  “And in the same way,” he said, his voice hard with unshaking conviction, “also the men abandoned the natural function of the woman and burned in their desire toward one another, men with men committing indecent acts and receiving in their own persons the due penalty of their error. Well, my children, we all know what that is now, don't we?” He was very close to them. Close to their faces.

  “The Epistle of Paul to the Romans! Yes. The gospel spells out this thing that the sinners call AIDS. And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer. God gave them over to a depraved mind to do those things which are not proper.

  “You know,” he said, feeling himself radiating the power of the Holy Spirit, “just a hundred years ago, a mere heartbeat of history, the big cities of the world were bastions of Christianity. New York. London. Paris. But in the year 2000, the largest cities of the world will be seething hotbeds of the anti-Christ.

  “And in cities like Beijing, Shanghai, and Bombay, millions of sinners will be born, live, and die without ever hearing the word of the gospel. Unrighteousness wickedness, greed, malice, envy, murder, strife, and deceit are a way of life to these heathen. Poverty and prostitution, immorality and malnutrition, these things corrupt and degrade the peoples of the vast, anti-Christian nations.” He had them now. He could sense his congregation inching closer to him, and it filled his heart with courage.

  “And they're moving to the west. These haters of God and inventors of evil. Foreign anti-Christs buying up our property, spoiling our culture, slithering into the foundations of our morality with their depraved ways.” One of his congregation touched him as he started walking again. He felt the touch against his boot as he stepped down onto the next massive slab of rock.

  “We must CRUSH these nonbelievers,” he shouted, reaching for a member of his congregation.

  They called him The Baptist, some of the ones who churched with him. He was something of a legend among them, but those who practiced the forbidden ways kept to themselves. They were not talkers.

  He was an old man with an ordinary appearance, wearing faded blue coveralls, tan work shirt, and scuffed boots. Standing alone on the side of a sunny cliff, holding a large, writhing rattler a few inches from his face, as if daring it to strike him.

  The slabs and buttresses around him were cover
ed with coiled snakes. The Baptist and his congregation.

  Amarillo, 1948

  Daddy hated the sound of baby crying, so he began punishing baby in unusual ways. He liked using the youngster's bottom as an ashtray, for example.

  The sadism would have accelerated and the boy would have been a poor candidate for survival, but fate intervened. A kindly neighbor called the police one time too often and investigating officers found the little boy alone, in a shit-filled cage, and he was rescued from Dad's loving care in time.

  His foster mommy, on the other hand, adored her new baby boy. It was her habit to cover the child's rear, a scarred lunar landscape of cicatrices from cigarette burns, with loving kisses.

  Soon the kisses took another turn and she found other ways of showing this strange child her deep adoration in these frequent moments of intimacy. But if the only parental contact you have known was a Camel to the buttocks, you can put these things in perspective.

  So, baby boy was content, and inside the scarred and twisted soul of the child a dark, bitter seed of evil took root, and was nurtured by Mommy's attentions, and by the cruel pinpricks of his flowering destiny. And puberty came early, and found the boy waiting.

  Blytheville, Arkansas

  “Special Agent Eichord?"

  “Yes, sir."

  “Bob Mott. I'm the chief of police."

  The men shook hands.

  “Good to meet you. Chief Mott. Appreciate this, and very sorry I had to drag you back to work."

  “No problem, Jack—if you don't mind first names? Call me Bob, please."

  “Thanks.” Eichord knew Chief Robert Mott's background from the task-force file. A top drawer career man with an ultra-clean professional history, running a big-city-style police department in a relatively small town. out the ears. Enviable arrest record. He'd cleared some bad homicides.

  “Just for the record, I was very relieved when I got the Fax from the Major Crimes Task Force replying to my rocket. And when I heard you were coming, I started counting the hours.” He was nodding as he spoke in a soft and serious voice. Eichord could tell the man was sincere.