"Sweetheart, go to sleep now. There'll be plenty of time for that later, when you're better."
"You're such a wonderful man," she murmured, and then drifted off.
Cummings covered her up. then padded to the kitchen. Oh, yes, it had been a long time, his erection was proof. He stood in the dark, in front of the kitchen sink, and masturbated, shucking his penis like an ear of corn. He could imagine how he'd appear to any onlooker: A grown man, a cop, beating his meat over the sink. Nevertheless, he orgasmed rather quickly, ejaculated, then sighed. The lines οf his semen lay like white slug trails in the bottom of the stainless-steel sink. He turned on the faucet, washed it all down the drain, like the gravy off of last night's Salisbury steak TV dinner...
For the whole time, though, he'd thought only of Kath. in her past days of beauty and voraciousness, and never of anyone else. Now that he was a "drug runner," many "opportunities" came his way. Junkies and shack hags and groupies, all hanging out at the drop-point, and all offered for his pleasure. Some of them weren't bad looking. They came with the trade.
But each time, Cummings declined, thinking of the real things in life, and his real promises. Driving point was one thing. Fucking junkie whores was another. He'd wait instead, sipping beer and smoking Lucky, while Spaz knocked the bottom out of them, his speedfreak face twitching...
He could’ve cried himself just then, that part of him which condemned what he was doing.
What else can I do! he exclaimed.
No answer was forthcoming.
He went back to bed and lay in the dark, Kath asleep at his side. He gazed up into the abyssal darkness as though it were the face of every mystery of humankind The nightsounds—spring peepers, crickets, hoot owls— seemed to merge with the icy moonlight streaming in through the window, to form a different sound, a more subjective one, a sound that only his wide-open soul could hear. The sound of the deepest chasms, or of the highest places of the earth...
And still more sounds haunted him when he drifted off into fitful sleep. The sound of nightmares...
Jesus...
The sound of a power drill fitted with a three-inch hole-saw. The sound of muted screams, and of bone smoking under 2500-rpm steel teeth. The sound—
—yes!
The sound of faceless hayseeds, of anonymous backwoods rednecks, chuckling as—
—as—
Jesus Christ, get me out of this dream!
—as heads...
Were humped...
The sound was evil. The sound was darkness, the uttermost darkness of the human mind. What could be conceived of more dark than this?
Humping... heads?
And the sound descended, a funnel to hell, fricatives and sybilants and murmurings as black as anthracite, as black as the gaps in the molars of the devil, and as black as his thoughts—
Cummings roused from his dredge-like sleep, as though touched by a cattle prod.
The phone was ringing.
........
Cummings met Beck the next morning, answering her late-night summons. She was an odd-looking woman, with ashy hair and a voice like someone with sinusitis, about forty. Jan Beck was the deputy field chief for the state police criminal evidence section. "Wild, huh?" she asked.
"I could think of more appropriate terms." Cummings replied.
For the last month, he'd been processing technical requests, and now, finally, they were being answered. "It's strange, all right," she said in her lab. She leaned against a Vision Series V blood analyzer and lit a cigarette, openly ignoring the DO NOT SMOKE IN THIS LAB sign. Shelves of glass-ware flanked one side of the brightly lit room, while various machines—gas and liquid chromatographs, mass-photospectrometers, Kodak fingerprint processors—flanked the other. "But you have to admit, the hills are a strange place. It's like another world."
"Tell me about it," Cummings nearly laughed. "I've been busting stills out in the sticks for years. But last night on the phone—you said you had something."
Jan Beck nodded, exhaled a plume a smoke. "Couple of things, actually. First off, I've got an ID on your perp."
Cummings simply stared at her words, his face becoming deranged.
"But don't get a hard-on in your pants just yet." Beck stubbed her butt out in a petri dish. "It was funny. You've been processing tech requests for quite a while. Yesterday I get an inter-office memo from Records saying that ATF had asked for a rap sweep on any cons recently paroled from the slam or popped from the state mental hospital."
"I processed that request a month ago." Cummings pointed out.
"Hey, things take time, and that's not my point. Records give me one name: Travis Clyde Tuckton. Did 11 years in Russell County Detent on a GTA and involuntary- manslaughter."
Cummings didn't quite follow her yet, but he wrote down the name in his pad. TRAVIS CLYDE TUCKTON.
"Then," Beck continued, sitting up on the top of a Sirchie iodine fuming cabinet. "Hair & Fibers calls me up. They put a full UV and IR scan on any grievous 64 we get piped through the Body Shop. What they found was a dried semen smear on the girl's right breast"
"Yeah?" Cummings bid.
Jan Beck's face remained deadpan. "The smear had a fingerprint in it. Dry. Perfect"
Cummings' heart suddenly thumped beneath his ATF tunic. He didn't have to ask, he didn't even have to goad her further.
"So we UV'd the print and photographed it, ran it through the Cyrix digitalizer, and then sent it through Triple-I at the State Bureau of Investigation. Took all of 20 seconds to spit out a latent match."
Cummings' eyes went wide as slot-machine slugs.
“Travis Clyde Tuckton." Beck said. "Some coincidence, huh? And Tuckton is A Pos Mn with 4F non-bar-bodies, same as the semen we've typed in every head"
"It's him," Cummings croaked. "I've got to—
"Save it. Tuckton got popped from county detent several months ago, skipped his parole officer the first minute. So we sent a goon squad to his last place of residence, and, guess what? It was burned to the ground, from years ago. Nothing there."
Cummings’ shoulders slumped. "So now it's needle-in-the-haystack time, huh?"
"Yeah. But at least you know your perp's name, and you know what he looks like."
Jan Beck handed Cummings a thin manila folder. Cummings blew off cigarette ashes, opened it. and gawped.
An in-pross photo. Hayseed just by looking at him: the kid had short black hair, slicked back, rubeburns, a big friendly farmboy-redneck grin and innocent brown eyes.
"If you hadn't pushed this." Beck pointed out, "we never would've bothered doing the forensic workups. We got a homicide guy on it now, but don't expect much action."
I hear that. Cummings thought. State wasn't going to put much manpower into a bunch of hillfolk murders, however bizarre. "Looks like its up to me."
"Good luck." Jan Beck offered. "Hey, and keep me posted, will ya? Can't wait to read the details when you catch this... head-humper."
"You got it. Thanks." Cummings made a quick exit from State HQ. He felt exhilarated. Look at what he'd done. He'd shagged the crime scenes, processed tech requests, and now he had his own investigation going on a real crime, not rednecks running panther piss but a sexually motivated, multiple homicide case. For the first time in a long time. Cummings felt like a cop.
But when he got back into his unmarked, his pager went off. It was Spaz.
"Yeah?" Cummings asked when he dialed up from a QWIK-STOP pay- phone.
Spaz sounded tittery in tense excitement. "We gotta run to make tonight. Big order, man. Meet me at Dutch's. We gotta enough blow to sink a ship."