“Eula Minery and Dub Ziegenheimer?” Eichord asked. “These the two that noticed the truck."
“Right."
“No satisfactory explanation as to what they were doing on a dark road at three in the morning. Looking down into a swampy old creek sixty feet below. They got priors or anything?"
“Nah."
“Something's funny about that. I don't know. Anyway, so the sheriff gets a call."
“Right. He gets outta bed and comes out. Gets the state rods and whatnot. They call us. The guys who did the diving with lights to try to see if there might have been another body thrown out in the impact, they see a car with three corpses in it and assumed that this was like—you know, an ACCIDENT—and then they go back down and find another car. And another. All old junkers. It was totally weird."
“I imagine.” A note on another page caught his eye and he said, “This one corpse marked as John Doe #2. Badly decomposed. Mutilated body. Heart missing. Estimated to be in the water six to eight weeks. What the hell is going on here?"
“Nothing good."
“That's for sure."
“Jeezus.” He read the composite sheet of recent missing persons in southern Stobaugh County.
Heather Annenberg. Daughter of a podiatrist. Probable runaway.
Mary Anne Brimer. A married dietician.
John Davis. Another truck driver.
Ernest Jones. A cook. Another Jones. A Johnson.
Bill Judd. A computer programmer.
Jesse Keys. A carpenter and jack-of-all-trades.
Rosa Lotti. Housewife. A kid named Lingle. Thirteen.
Royce Maxwell. Unemployed.
Melba Murphy. College freshman.
Nuyen. Obergoenner, Odum, Olivera, Pyland, Reeves, Robinson, Rothstein, Rudert, Schmitz, Shanda, two Smiths, Sneathern, Stewart, Tewls, Timmons, Wade, Weiss. Which one of you is the face in the window?
Is it you, Royce Odum, twenty-seven, on your way home from representing the Monroe Implement Bowling League in a regional tournament, driving home to tiny Texas Corners after a great 259 game, never reaching your destination, your car found locked and empty in a field? Is it your face plastered there in the window of the rusting, wheelless car—a bloated freaked-out concentration camp photo to frighten your survivors, that look of horror caught on what was once your face in midscream? Is this your skull face, Royce? Talk, ole buddy, and tell me. Whodunit?
But Royce Odum is not talking now. Perhaps later. Later tonight when Eichord has spent a tiring and brutalizing day with the hideous cadavers and the frightening death-camp scenes, and he's back in his bed in the Hubbard City Motel; perhaps he'll be ready for a chat. Maybe while dreaming of Sugar Lake, Jack will spit into a visor and pull his mask on and dive down for a look-see, Royce. Down in the cold, muddy waters of dark Sugar Lake.
Perhaps tonight Jack will swim along through his own bubbles as he circles through the frigid underwater shadows of his childhood friends Whortley Williams and Cabrey Brown, his unforgettable pals of long ago, the bully boys who terrorized him so. And maybe he'll find them, each wearing a twisted chain around their elongated necks, each bloated, rotten body chained to the other and then wired to the roots of a mysterious dream tree, a leftover from the Houtcheson case. And then he'll swim by Royce's car and he'll be ready to say hello—speak to him then from that screaming skullhead and tell him all about it.
And seeing the imaginary and the real murder victims will somehow jar loose the old memory of a phrase—"salt walter taffy"—a combination of a cop's first name, the label of a waxy paper-covered piece of candy he once saw that he misread for salt water cadavers, a particularly gruesome pictorial chapter of a police forensics book, and God knows what childhood nightmare.
Will you speak to him then, Royce Odum? Telling Jack of the final minutes and seconds of your life, and of the monster of a man who took you down with muscles of steel and a neck, chest, leg, forearm, hip, gluteus max, pectorals triceps belly hardened by the cruelest regimen of bench presses, deep knee-bends, power squats, sit-ups, arms curls with stacks of landscape timbers, a thousand then ten thousand reps with the weighted whipsickle through impenetrable vetch, his cumbrous bulk and weight sweating, hardening, melting away, the fat dripping off, the steel tendons and muscles preparing to take you to the edge as you ascend the mountaintop funicular and your car breaks loose from the cables and you plummet down out of the sky toward an unyielding death that waits to flatten you—a final, bloody scream trapped in your throat.
And the dream will be very real and in the morning Jack Eichord will not awaken with a hangover as he has done on so many hundreds of shaking, booze-battered mornings in memory. He will awaken with the taste of taffy and the lingering, distinctive smell of a neoprene wet suit, and the thought of Royce's face in the window to chill him to the core. In his heart he will be afraid yet as he comes awake he will not know why.
“I think we may have ‘em all,” the guy told him. “Fourteen bodies,” and the number 14 stayed in his mind but he couldn't remember why or where or what. He remembered what it was when he got dressed the next morning, picking up the small fourteen-inch cardboard box that he carried everywhere now, the box that was only fourteen inches long, EXACTLY fourteen inches, but it felt like it weighed fourteen pounds. The box he carried the thing he'd made in—that day of his other recent nightmare, when he'd woken up after the blue-eyed Mengele clinic twins and the screaming voice that proved not to be a dream at all—the thing he'd made with his own wittle hacksaw.
One could no longer see the part that said it was “Made in New Haven, Conn., USA.” It no longer carried the maker's marks or the proud “Winchester Proof Steel.” All that was left said “L1653799,” and the thing was good for only one purpose. Up close, he could point this at four guys all at the same time, and this baby would quell a fucking mutiny. Because anybody could see that this thing Eichord carried in the box was ready to kick some serious ass. Eichord had grown weary of missing what he shot at. He didn't know how weary.
Jack Eichord had that feeling you get when the long double lane of cars is rolling through the tunnel under the river, the traffic bumper to bumper, everybody tailgating, everybody in a hurry, and suddenly somebody way up ahead slams on the brakes for whatever reason and all these vehicles screech to a stop. And you wait. And you know the cars will all start moving pretty soon the way they always do. And a few assholes start honking. Then you turn off the engine and kill your lights and just sit there. Waiting. Wondering what's happened up ahead in the darkness. Realizing for the first time there's a RIVER over your head on the other side of all the concrete and steel. Knowing that there's trouble up ahead. And with each minute that passes, the odds grow greater that the trouble is serious. And you can't help but say to yourself, If trouble had to come, why the hell couldn't it wait until I made it through to the light at the other end?
CHATTANOOGA
Chaingang is in his new used car. Legit wheels. Insulated now by the paper trappings of the real straight world that will protect him from the law's curious gaze. The endless need to steal another ride and more disposal problems that often attend such an acquisition have ceased to exist. He is a citizen. He has rights. Papers. A hugely pregnant wife beside him.
“God,” she says, letting out a quiet moan. She has turned into a little whining noise that he keeps tuned out for the most part. It is getting close to the time. The blood had appeared yesterday. Then a watery, colorless gush that finally thinned to a dribble, and not long after that the serious pains began.
“Just take it easy,” he tells her solicitously, but she seems to have tuned out on him the way he has on her. She only lets out a noise, “Mmmm-mmmmm,” a halfhearted whine that has become her shorthand for okay. She is hurting now at regular intervals for the first time. The pains hit every couple of minutes now. He finds a motel and all but carries her into the room.