Rikla was now as scared of the Dagatina people as he was of the Measure crew, what was left of it, but what happened to Willie Ray was the final straw.
At about eight-thirty that morning Campbell, head covered in an old-fashioned do-wrap over his straightened, styled "conk" that looked like something from a Negro documentary, was just sitting there on the bus minding his beeswax, sitting there in his jail clothes when the whole frig-gin' bus blew up.
A two-man guard detail and the driver were also killed. No fucking reason. All the police told media was mere was evidence of electronically detonated high explosives. No known motive. No suspects. Another in the series of gangland-related homicides that had St. Louis terror-stricken. And now Measure gets taken down and his people are STILL goin' under. Suddenly Rikla felt like he had cross hairs painted on his forehead.
The bus bombing had occurred at approximately four-forty. The news had it on the early cast. Five minutes that included a three-and-a-half-minute sound bite at the crime scene and lots of gore. Rikla was home, watching it on a tummy TV, with a real bad case of the green-apple quick step. Two hours later, Paul Rikla and a pair of attorneys from Rozitsky, Karp and Nathan were waiting to see the DA and talking about RICO and the Federal Witness Security Program and trying to put some kind of a deal together for their very nervous client. Rikla figured, "I'd rather be a live rat than a damn dead man." Which pretty well summed up the situation. The consensus among all those close enough to hear the comment was that he'd described himself accurately, one way or the other.
Rightfully, Rikla had told his personal mouthpiece, "I don't know who's doin' da shit, if it's coppers, wise guys, or a crazy contract man that's doing the work. Whoever they are if they got the balls they can blow up a federal prison bus. I'm not waitin' around for 'em to come for me. That's it. Fuck it. I'm history."
So there he sat in his "surrender" clothes. The bottom half of an eighteen-hundred-dollar silk suit, and a Neiman's cardigan over a LaCoste golf shirt, gold chains, watch, ID bracelet, pinkie diamond big as a grape, pure twenty-four-karat wise guy, wanting to go public behind the "witless protection program," as Leech had called it.
They were joking about the four-hundred-pound hit man who had been given a new face with plastic surgery, a new identity, and flown from the Boston area to Seattle, where he was relocated under a new name. After a few months of boredom he went back to his old line of work and was promptly found and obliterated, being the only four-hundred-pound hit man on the West Coast with a South Baaahston accent you could cut with a knife. What they cut with a knife wasn't his accent.
Rikla, who had been Sally Dago's counselor, friend, confessor, confidant, and sounding board, knew where all the bodies were buried. He went back to the beginning of the Dagatina thing. He claimed he knew things that nobody else in the family knew and if the feds would take him into the program he'd testify. Give us an example, the big boys asked him, and he teased them with a tale of a chief enforcer trying to wage a one-man war against the families, and tantalized them with the promise of dirty cops.
"When I know I got full-time protection and d' coppers or the Dagos can't touch me, I'll give you the whole outfit. Right from the top down and you won't fuckin' believe it. I've got coppers runnin' my own scams right here in St. Louis. I ain't just talking about no bagman, I'm talking about swindles where you go in a certain place of business an' if we don' get five cents the coppers will come around and shut the house dis way," meaning they'll close the business down.
"Give us a for-instance — like what jurisdictional area?"
"I'll give ya a taste but dat's it until I see the thing come together for me. Awright, would you believe Metro East?"
And it went on like that for a while and the big boys took him away for bigger and better things, and Leech told Eichord about it. They were both tired. First thing they got off on "what's the worst thing you've ever seen" stories, and Leech told his, which was the old lady that committed suicide with an ax. Eichord said he didn't believe it and Leech told him,
"Emmis, my man, she was a stout old gal about eighty years old, big heavy old gal with arms like this, and she went nuts, got into it with her old man, and chopped his head off with an ax while he was dead-drunk. Doubt if he ever knew what hit him. Then she decided to kill herself."
"With the ax?"
"Exactly."
"Hey. Could I ax you a question?" a cop named Wunderlicht said, and they laughed. "How can you do it with an ax, slit your belly open?"
"Nope. She took hold of the handle with both hands like so, held it as far out as she could, and goes WWWWHHHHHHHAAAAAAAMMM-MMPPPPP! Right smack dead-center in her forehead. Right between the running lights."
"Bullshit."
"I got the fuckin' lab photos if you want to lay a ten on it. Jack. You can see it. She's still got a holt of it, and you can see the skull and that sucker is wedged in the brain real good, like a big ole ripe melon that busted open."
"This conversation has made me hungry. Let's go get some melons."
"Seriously, how can you —" And for ten minutes they lost themselves in a discussion of the ax weight, and the best way to hold an ax to kill yourself with it, and on and on like that.
Eichord knew cops. He liked them, too. He knew what made them tick. Why they were there and what it took to keep you sane on The Job. This kind of talk was just blowing off steam. It was a way to say. This dirt I live in, this filth that I work in, it's not real. It doesn't really touch me. It doesn't exist. Just words. At least this was the way he looked at it.
He listened to another cop, Pat Skully, talking about the time back when he was a narc and they raided a house and dead babies were everywhere. It was the worst he'd ever seen and there was no joking during the story. Two dealers had beat the cops to the pad, which was a shooting gallery for hypes. The woman who ran the house had four little kids ranging from a newborn baby to about six or so in age. When the narcs found them the dealers had killed all of them in a rage. The babies were flattened. As Skully started telling how it had been done, Eichord got up quietly and unobtrusively left the room.
Bud Leech caught him down on the street.
"Let's catch a buzz," Eichord said.
"Why not?" And they went in the nearest tavern and tilted a cold one each.
"The funniest thing about Rikla, you know, giving himself up today. I know this pervert from way back. I go back to when I was working in a little hick community and hearing horror stories about how Mr. G. ran St. Louis, an' these St. Louis ad vice guys were telling me all about this dude named Paul Rikla who was a chickenfucker. And I told them, You mean he liked little boys, like a chickenhawk. No, he liked fucking chickens.
"He had priors going back to this time they answered a disturbance call about some perv waggin' his wienie in this residential neighborhood. Man in a car nude, they hear. They investigate and there's this Coupe De Ville parked there, and the cops go up to it and shine the light in, and out of the Caddy hops Rikla, stone mother naked and carrying a butcher knife all covered in blood. This is a true story, by the way. He looked like he wanted to be shot real bad and he almost got his wish 'cause they damn near popped a cap on him when they saw him like that.
"Inside the car was the rest of the story. He has this beautiful young Syrian daughter, and she was with him in the front seat of the car, and the vehicle is covered in blood and feathers. Rikla would slice the head off of a chicken and daughter would take and jam the fowl's severed windpipe down on Daddy's cock-a-doodle-doo, and the headless bird would flop and bop him off."