“I'm the only one in this whole fuckin place knows what he's about,” Dana said, taking a noisy sip of coffee and wiping at the front of his shirt absent-mindedly, like somebody who was used to having crumbs all over him.
Eichord remembered the time it had all come to a head. The first homicide they'd been on after Tucker had been transferred from Metro. Woman and a dude both dead of gunshot wounds. One of the scenes that was so unreal everybody figures it has to be apocraphyl when the coppers trade stories later.
Jack could see the building as if it was yesterday, a run-down duplex with the orange tape around the exterior. A crime scene sealed off by the upside-down legend DO NOT CROSS POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS. And if you kind of squinted and let it run together it said CROSS POLICE LINE DONUT. And he can see them all going in and the blood and the bodies there.
Each man was a different-style detective. Eichord into vibes, the feel of a scene, the aura. Dana, when he wasn't being sloppy, was a plodder. Meticulous. A detail man as good as any evidence tech. Tucker was a steamroller type. His method of getting from point A to point B was to run full speed until he crashed into a wall.
“In here,” Dana had said, and Eichord had gone in the room where the man was.
“That the shotgun?” It was rhetorical. It looked like a murder/suicide. One of the bad domestic things you'll catch when the moon is right. For the first few minutes everybody was conducting the business at hand. So far so good. It appeared the man had killed his woman, blowing her apart with three or maybe four up-close blasts. You had to be sorely steamed at somebody to keep shooting them like that. Racking those spent shells out and letting another hot load of lead pellets perforate what had been a human being. Then, with the last shell up the spout and ready, the man had apparently killed himself.
“He did her in there. Then he comes in and sits down on the bed and gets all comfy and puts the gun up to the side of his head and pulls the trigger. BANG!"
“Yeah."
“And he's all over the walls."
The gun had pulled slightly and the scatter of shot had completely blown off the front of the man's face. Until you've seen a person with their face shot off, you can't imagine what it looks like.
They were in the bedroom, with Tucker and Brown in the room with the woman and the other cops, and Tuny whispered to Eichord, “Look,” in his most frightening, hushed tone of voice.
And Jack came over and saw what it was. It was plastered to the mirror like it had been glued there. The man's mustache, complete with a flap from his upper lip, perfectly peeled as if it had been shaved off with a knife, and Tuny got behind Jack and moved him over slightly and it looked like Jack was wearing the man's mustache in the mirror, and in spite of all the blood and the smell and the awful horror, the two of them giggled and it was all Dana needed to do something that you just didn't do on murder investigation—you don't touch the evidence.
He reached over and peeled the mustache and lip off the mirror and held it at his side, an evil glare in his eyes.
“Hey, Mon-ROOOOOE, come ‘ere, man."
“—tryin’ to burn some coffee grounds but we couldn't find any, so we found some cloves out there in the kitchen and put ‘em in a pan—"
“Somethin’ I, er, uh, want to ax you,” Dana said, “Monnnnn—roooe,” exaggerating the accent. “How come you don't have no mustache?"
“Say WHAT?"
“You know, all you black dudes got them little pussy ticklers. Little pencil-line jobs. How come you don't have one?"
“Bullshit,” he said, turning to Eichord, “this fat boy here gone gunny-fruit or what?” One thing Monroe Tucker didn't like was fat, white, bigoted, honkie chuck wise-ass jokers. And one thing he especially didn't like was practical jokes played on him. Which is when and why and how and who and what and where fat Dana slapped something up on the black cop's face saying, “Well, NOW you got one. Check it out,” holding the cop's arms as he spun him toward the blood-flecked mirror so that he could see himself wearing the man's mustache, surgically removed by double-O buck, complete with lip remnant, and Eichord could still hear his howl of rage, his scream of grossed-out horror, his primal yell of shock and anger, and his frantic slapping at himself, and then his attack, which nearly put Dana in the hospital, Eichord pulling them apart, gentling Tucker down, all the while laughing to himself at the unbelievable madness of the work he did.
Even now he could hear the echo of fat Dana's one-liner that would live on at Buckhead Station as a kind of mini-legend.
“Well, there's one dude who won't shoot his mouth off again."
Las Vegas, 1985
The handsome man with the strikingly beautiful woman walked around the corner of the hotel corridor—that is she walked around the corner—as they moved through a pocket of tourists standing at some sort of information counter. He was what you saw first, but she was what you speculated about, whispering of her beauty, wondering if she was a showgirl or perhaps a high-priced courtesan.
She walked behind him, a comforting presence, and he had a fixed smile on his face as they moved through the hayseeds. She knew how he liked to be treated and it relaxed him a bit. He was always somewhat on edge right before heavy play, and one less thing to concern himself with was a definite plus. He could count on her.
She was a knockout, and it never failed to amuse and please him the way not just men but women too stared when she—when THEY—came into a room. He liked her best in low-cut necklines when they went shopping to those carefully selected stores that he considered accessible, to clubs, bars, restaurants, but not to the casinos.
When he gambled he wanted her decorous. Sexy but decorous. So he kept her in tailored suits. Sweater ensembles. High-necked cocktail dresses. It mattered not. They, the pair of them, still drew an instant crowd, but with the low tops guys would hover like buzzards, pressing around them at the tables for a closer look at those perfect breasts, the finest that money could buy. And it made nun uncomfortable and fucked his concentration over, so that's why he had her dress up her act a little for the tables.
The casino was buzzing tonight. Heavy play in the neon beehive. A swirl of activity, a cloud of smoke, a circumambience of continuous movement inside a vast and noisy arena. They were moving in the direction of the roulette table with the least action. Like most of the plush joints on the strip, this one only had two wheel tables and this was his action. Red and black. He was like the good-looking masthead on a ship's prow, cutting through the waves of moving jerks, slicing purposely through the congestion with his beautiful Nicki behind him, leaving the small fish gasping in their wake.
They reached the table and he beckoned her to him with a hand.
“I love your ass,” he whispered to her possessively as she smiled at him. A beautiful, dazzling, perfect smile. “You gorgeous bitch."
She smiled and kissed him very lightly, saying, “I love you, too,” saying something else endearing, whispering so softly he couldn't hear over the din.
He loved that soft, feminine voice. Jeezus. Who'd ever guess? In a million fucking years you'd never know that Nicki was a guy.
Of course she WASN'T. He never thought of her as a young man or a transvestite or anything like that. Even the first time they'd made love, when he'd drawn her on that weird outcall thing, back when she was tricking. He smiled. “Tricking.” What a word. Perfect for Nicki. She was a trick, all right. Even then, first time he'd found out about the “plumbing” problem, he'd accepted it as just one more terrific joke by the cosmic stand-up comic. Nothing about her was a turn-off. Least of all what she really was, clinically and legally.