It was a prayer of a kind that he thought as he rolled over and looked at this miracle beside him. Lord, anybody who can turn out one of these can't be all bad. What a lady. He saw those legs for the first time, the dazzling curve that became a flatness of stomach and rolling upward into a magnificently formed chest that met a perfect throat and then she rolled over and moaned and Eichord saw the most beautiful ass he'd ever seen and he thought of himself as a connoisseur of female butts, a heinie epicurean, a derriere gourmet. He told her as much, his voice cracking with the effort of verbalizing speech.
"You know something?"
"Hmm?"
"You've got—the loveliest—oh, yes, the loveliest rear end—in the world. Did you know that?"
"I'm glad you think so," she whispered back to him. "I guess I never thought about it much."
"You mean, seriously, guys haven't always told you that you had a fabulous ass," he said, without thinking.
"Well. No. I mean, I guess I knew I had an okay rear end, but—" she trailed off.
"Uh-huh. An okay rear end, is that what you think you have?"
"Yeah. Okay. Nothing special. Nothing to get that excited about. It's just adequate. An okay rear end." She smiled.
"If that's an okay rear end," he said hoarsely, "the 1959 Eldorado had an okay rear end. I mean we are talkin' Hall of Fame classics here, lady."
"Oh, sir, you make me blush," she murmured, still on her stomach.
"Yes. I can definitely see that." He lay there transfixed. "I know where I want to have dinner tonight, beautiful," he said.
"Where?"
"Ummmmmmmm," he replied, rolling her over on her back again. And soon she was making those sounds. Doing it again. Making those hot little whimpering noises that turned him on like crazy, and it all caught fire again and the embers that he thought had finally gone out were fanned into a burning flame once more, and he was rock hard and inside and they were both slick with sweat and love juice and bodily fluids in a wild, white-hot heat of the moment.
Neither of them could quite believe it. He was totally immobilized again. Not just drained. His crank-case was empty, folks. Bone dry. He was exsanguinated. Dead and buried. Motionless as she traced outlines up and down with those hot fingertips and Jack knew Edie was smiling as she ran those fiery fingers across him, playing with him, and it made him laugh and they were in each other's arms and enjoying their discovery so much.
The humor of it was just ineffable and illogical and they both felt giddy, hysterical, a little confused, mindfucked, spent. They came apart and just looked at each other, sweat drying on their bodies, and just glued themselves to the sheets, too blown to even smoke. And he felt some very weak stirrings again as he ran his hands over those hard nipples and before they knew it they were together once more in a drunken kind of slow, languorous, loving, easy thing. Moving to some unheard reggae beat, some bedsprings ca-chunk, ca-chunk, in a very gentle, soft, concupiscent pushing, his hands on her moving over her in the darkness, exploring hidden treasures in the ruins of the fires, and later he felt her erupt like a volcano, washing him in molten lava, burning him again with the wetness from her loins and he moaned with delight into the sweet candy of his lover's mouth.
Edie and Daniel
At some point, or as the Watergate-era co-conspirators would say, at some point in time the lines of lives destined to come together will come so close the interstices narrow to nothingness and the vectors almost cross. It was that way with Edie and a monster, whose lives would nearly touch. And yet, amazingly, neither would realize it. Nor would the cop Jack Eichord, whose own vector had already crossed one of the lives and was reaching toward the other to complete this overlapping triangle as diagrammed by destiny.
At 151130 Central, Mrs. Edith Lynch was registering a complaint with a rather unresponsive and tired employee of a major department store and was saying: "—that it wouldn't be any problem to return it."
"It isn't any problem," the woman was saying, "but I have to get the number to put in the computer, and if you put the invoice in with it when you sent it back to the catalog center, then how can I help you?"
"But I have the number right here, as I just told you, the thing is that the two numbers don't— "
And at 151130 Central, Daniel Bunkowski was squeezed behind the wheel of a stolen Mercury Cougar, window down on the passenger side, tape deck blasting. He was on the outskirts of Chicago, trying to negotiate the heavy Chicago traffic in the uncomfortable Merc, black vinyl over silver, license X-Ray Tango Romeo-1969 belonging to one Olin Neidorf of Mount Vernon, Illinois, now deceased. Mel Torme was emoting from the car speakers.
He heard something about writing the words again, as Bunkowski ejected the tape savagely and twisted the radio dial to a teenybopper hard-rock station, blinking his reddened pig eyes and concentrating on his driving. Just an hour or so now and he'd dump this piece of crap.
And at precisely 151130 Jack Eichord was sitting in the squad room at his borrowed desk doodling on a yellow legal pad. He had just finished a doodle, what looked like a doodle in any event, based on the commonalities of medical records of certain individuals and he was beginning what someone might have termed his E doodle. He sometimes just sat and drew the letter E, never bothering to reason why. He thought and schemed by what might have been called the doodle method, but he had never put a name to it. It was simply part of his process of analyzing data.
He would sit, sometimes for hours on end, a felt-tipped pen making neat, precise marks on a legal pad or whatever paper was available as he allowed his ability to free-associate time and space to analyze. He would throw his brain into neutral, just sit there doodling, let it all come naturally, thinking quietly and as organically as he could let himself, eliciting all manner of arcane lore, evoking any number of trivial facts, educing commonality and pattern where there often would be none.
The E doodle had many variations, and was worth zilch as police work goes but for some reason it often preoccupied him during these reflective times and so he invariably gave rein to it. Here was the way his latest E doodle looked on paper:
E
SylvEEya (phon.)
AvEry Johnson
Kasikoff
CharlEs Maitland
Edna Porter GiavinEllo
VErnon ArlEn
Edward William Lynch
Richard SchEigE
Edie Lynch middle name EmalinE
Eichord
Bill JoycE
LEE AnnE Lynch
At 175500 Edie was drinking a cup of coffee with her friend Sandi who was saying, "—so glad you are."
"Me too, you know? I mean even if this doesn't last—"
"It will; don't say that. Think positive."
"I can't think at all, that's the problem."
"Oh, I'd love to feel that way again. It's been so long since I went love crazy." They both giggled.
"That's what I thought too, but now I'm so head over heels that I— "
At 175500 Daniel Bunkowski was pulling into the area known as Oldtown, looking at the odd human landscapes of hippies, winos, coke snorters, and antique dealers, and listening to a completely insincere resonance extol the highly dubious virtues of a chain of waterbed stores. He smashed at the radio dial with a vicious backfist. He was ravenously hungry. What do I want? he thought. Chinese, he told himself. A big sack of egg rolls with lots of sweet and sour to go with it. And a quart of Wild Turkey to wash it down. And later maybe play with one of these bums.