“There you are,” Eichord said.
“NO."
“Say YES. Jonathan. Say YES. Can you say YES?"
"NO!"
“Please?"
“No,” the child cooed pleasantly.
“Okay.” Donna turned to Jack. “Come with us?"
“Can't do it, babe.” He was afraid that everything showed in his voice. He had the doll house and the three dolls waiting for them for after church. He'd had them for days, but couldn't bring himself to do it. He couldn't wait any longer. They had to start trying to pull the little boy out of whatever darkness had hold of him.
Church had been a disaster for Donna. Jonathan had misbehaved, she told him, and she'd finally been forced to take him to the cry room, off the nursery, where a woman had entertained him until the services were over and Donna could reclaim him.
“Were you a bad boy in church?” Jack asked.
"NO! NO! NO! NO!" Screaming at the top of his voice.
After he'd had some time to calm down, the three of them had a light lunch, and then Jack and Donna sat down on the floor with Jonathan and played dolls. This is Mommy and Daddy. They love each other very much. God gave them a little son. This is Jonathan. They loved Jonathan with all their hearts. They lived together in a house by the side of the road. And so on...
About five-forty-five Donna walked in front of the TV set in the family room where Jack sat vegetating in front of a football game. She was sobbing.
“What is it, angel?” He leaned forward, starting to stand up, and froze at the look of horror on her face as she showed him what she had in her hands.
“He-he brought them to me.” It was the Mommy and Daddy dolls. They were headless. Hey, things take time. No big deal. He's just a little boy.
He waited until about eight that night, and on the pretense of going out to pick up a magazine, he left the house and called Doug Geary long-distance from a payphone. He took him through the recent chain of events.
Dr. Geary said, “Jack, my friend, isn't it possible you've blown these things out of proportion? Two-year-olds don't take photographs out of picture frames. Their hand-to-eye coordination wouldn't allow it. Don't you think you may be reading into the—"
“Doc, it wasn't like that. He pulled that picture down and the glass broke. It never did fit in the frame right anyway, and when it hit the floor, the picture fell out. But he reached a little hand into that pile of glass and got the photograph. I saw him tear it. I saw his eyes."
“He'll grow out of it. Jack. They all do."
“He tore the HEADS off the dolls that represented us. He HATES us."
“Listen, it's perfectly natural.” He spent ten more minutes doing his best to reassure Jack Eichord that two-year-old Jonathan was going to be all right. It would work out. The kid wasn't a latent psycopath, after all. Everything would work out.
Finally Jack rang off with self-deprecating apologies, some laughter, and profuse thanks. But he wasn't smiling when the line went dead. Inside him there was something worse than any horror he'd ever known. A gnawing thing that he was afraid was chewing out a permanent place in his guts. He had lived to see one of his worst fears realized: finding himself having to constantly fight his own thought processes, the one horror you can never escape. Thought cancer.
Driving back home under the painful weight of it, he could understand that he was working overtime to throw off verboten thoughts, fighting to shake loose of them like someone throwing off piles of extra covers on a hot summer night, only to awake the next morning drenched in sweat and covered in the same blankets.
And in the morning Eichord woke up petrified with the fearful leftover vision from his night dreams: the official form with the space marked accident—suicide-homicide. The one he'd dreamed was marked cause of death—deferred.
16 Days Later
One thing about fighting—you could make up. They were on the bed.
“You're a good chick,” he told her, sitting beside her and patting her leg, “you know that?"
The kid was asleep, temporarily forgotten.
“Aww. How sweet.” She took his big hand and kissed the hairy, thick fingers and the large knuckles.
“That's me."
“You sure have been down in the dumps lately."
“Nawww. Not really."
“Urn hmmm."
“Nah. Just moody—I dunno. Quiet, I guess."
“I know you too well, sweetie. You'll eventually tell me what's buggin’ you. When you get good and ready."
“Don't worry about me. I'm cool."
“I guess it's second nature to worry about you,” she said, “considering the nature of your job. I'll probably always worry about you. But I'm not worried now. You just seem preoccupied. Kind of blue or bugged or something. I don't have anything to worry about, do I?"
“Nope.” He leaned over and kissed her softly.
“You haven't been foolhardy, have you. Officer? Haven't done something else real heroic, have you? Don't scare me now."
“Never fear, babe. Or, as Stan Laurel used to say, I'm no fool. Hardy."
“I see."
“Sounds like a Mel Brooks line."
“Yeah, but Mel Brooks can't do this,” she said, and she pulled him down to her and started doing a truly miraculous thing to his mouth and his eyes and his ears and his face, doing something with her tongue that felt so hot, and the silk robe was coming open and he saw what she was wearing under it.
A flimsy little thing he'd seen in one of the lingerie catalogs she'd heard him remark about. Oh, my sakes alive. Heavens to Betsy. Yes. He touched her and she pulled back a little and let him look at those perfectly shaped expialadocious breasts of hers, which were threatening to rip through the wispy top. Oh, yeah. And he was on top of her in all her titillating erect-nippled tongue-salivating schlong-hardening gorgeous get-inside-of-me-and-do-it perfection.
Afterward Donna wouldn't leave him alone. She started playing with him. Teasing him very gently with her hand, barely touching him with her fingers. Letting her fingertips flutter over him intimately, and there was some response and she said, in her sexiest whisper, “I want more,” and he told her, “You expect a lot of a dead man,” but she knew how to inflame him and he rose to the occasion.
He was very relaxed, nude under a sheet listening to Donna shower, and two words forced their way in before he could slam his brain shut and block them out. Two ugly, bloodred words that had no business here on this nice day, intruding on their playtime, forcing their way into his bedroom:
E N T R A N C E W O U N D
is what he saw with his mind's eye. Then, instantly visualizing his mental checklist, which he reconstructed anew each time a memory assailed his waking thoughts.
E N T R A N C E W O U N D / E X I T
L A T E N T P R I N T S
B A L L I S T I C S
H A I R & F I B E R S
E V I D E N C E / D O C U M E N T S
M O T I V E
and on down through the two dozen awful wet and slippery places where a man could step and suddenly his feet were out from under him and he was flying through the air and heading for the open window and it was such a long fall to the bottom...
How many times would he have to run through that horror of a day? Sit in that car again watching Scum-wad leave. Knock at that big, ornate door and hear the thing inside screech. Muscle in and get the name on the suicide note folded under a fake Miranda. Obtain a print on the bullet, and later the rounds for the magazine. Load that first one surreptitiously. Get the angle just so. Pressure on the trigger. Note the position of the brass. Check for blood and gore on the clothing. The ballistics box is in the sack with the other stuff. Put the clip back in, force the skinny fingers around the drop-gun, push it into the hole in the box and fire. Spent brass in the sack. Prints on the note. Note nearby. Type the note again and the paper goes in the sack. Did he remember to put some of the pocket lint on the shells that went in the magazine? Did he remember not to forget to remember what it was he wasn't supposed to forget?