There are ice-cream concoctions so sweetly delicious that you know you will regret eating them, the hot-fudge cherry-topped decadence of the Supreme Banana Split Special with the ice cream that has the unpronounceable name being so good that all ice-cream dishes will forever taste flat and mediocre by comparison. Furs exist so sexually and viscerally exciting that to touch one against the cheek is to be ruined for the affordable and the mundane. But sometimes the lure of the forbidden sweetness and the invitation of the rich and inaccessible are so strong they cannot be denied and you feast and touch and savor, the tactile senses taking over where reason and logic are abandoned. And the touch is a touch you feel deep within your soul and the taste is so hot and indescribable and satisfying that you abandon all caution and eat as if there will be no tomorrow.
Eichord was not an inexperienced man. He had dreamed many times before. He had dreamed of hot and fantastic sex. But he had never dreamed like this. His climax was not the end. There would be no end for this dream. He would waken and then later, when he surrendered to sleep once more, he would be welcomed back into the unending humiliation that his subconscious had constructed for him, to help him atone for his sins.
The Pathway
The pathway is very dark but not so dark you are unable to see. You can see shapes there along the pathway. It would appear differently to each person. To the frightened man it exists in his mind as a literal path that becomes a room (it is often seen as a dark room by those who can see it), and the room becomes a series of rooms like a maze, with the rooms interlocked by an illogical but nevertheless real-appearing set of circular corridors. All of the walls are of gray stone and the floors and ceilings are cold and featureless concrete. The light comes from bare bulbs which hang from the concrete ceilings every fifty yards or so. In between the bulbs the ever-curving corridors of stone are mostly in black shadow.
It is cold and still along the pathway and the man is so afraid of what he knows is coming that he must suddenly urinate and his bladder and prostate problems cause a spreading wetness even as he is unzipping his trousers as quickly as he can, and he cannot get it out in time and soaks the front of his pants as he feels a not-unpleasant warmth drench his front, and finally he finishes urinating along the wall of the corridor, pissing in the darkest part so nobody will see it, and he goes ahead moving down the ever-curving concrete pathway under the glare of the raw light, moving through pools of strong, harsh light and puddles of scary darkness, moving closer to the thing that he knows is coming for him.
When he awakens it is deep in trauma and shock and in a netherworld of terror-stricken, paralyzing fear as the shadow behind him moves, releasing him.
The sense of coming to is not the same as waking or regaining consciousness after blacking out, or of feeling the effects of anesthesia wear off. It is more a sense of being able to shift one's thought again, an awareness of control returning.
And the frightened man moves carefully, moving back around the awful curve of the stone and concrete chamber, and as he turns in his mind it is the same as if you had backed out of a darkened tunnel and as you turned you were out in bright sunlight and fresh air again and his face is wet with streaming tears of gratitude and relief at being alive and he winces at the residue of real pain as he unbuckles his pants, still soaked in urine, pitching them as far from him as the cell will allow.
Soon, he thinks, his breath coming in big gulps. His hands are shaking badly. Very soon now. And William “Ukie” Hackabee, as he is known, will do what he must. And pray that it will allow him to survive. Because when you get down to the basics nothing else matters. Survival is everything.
Dallas
The morning started off badly. Eichord awoke with a killer headache, the kind he used to get after a night and a full day of constant and progressively heavy boozing. The thing is, with the exception of imaginary wine, he hadn't had a taste of anything stronger than coffee in the last forty-eight hours. It was a hangover without the fun the night before.
When he finally made it back downtown in one piece, compliments of the friendly folks out there on the Central Expressway, the Dallas cop shop looked like somebody had declared martial law. He asked Wally Michaels, “Wally, what the hell's going on this morning? They find some more graves?"
“Yesterday. Yeah. No, this is from the shooting thing."
“Something on the Grave-digger?"
“No. Unrelated. You didn't hear about the old man?"
“I just got here."
“Obviously you haven't heard or seen any local news this morning."
“Not a drop."
“Okay. Old guy got iced out in Singing Hills. There's a little subdivision out there with a public golf course. Black man was a sort of combination janitor, assistant greens-keeper. Lived in a little house on the course next to the pro shop. Anyway there was a car answered a disturbance call and one thing leads to another, the patrolmen tried to bring him in—he was fried, had a piece waving it around and shouting and what-not. He points and each popped a couple of caps at him. DOA and on the books as ‘mortally wounded while resisting arrest.’ But big problems."
“Not righteous?"
“No, IAD's shooting team said it looked copacetic, but the old gent was fuckin’ eighty-two years old."
“It's a shame, but it happens. So what's the furor?"
“No"—Wally shook his head like he had a bug in his ear—"you don't know the situation here. We've been up to our ass in crocodiles ever since the Jackson case. Young black. Witnesses say it was a murder. The patrolman is being investigated. Currently suspended. Then an eighty-year-old black lady got shot trying to keep a cop from arresting her grandson on a dope bust. We've got another potential Watts here. Last night on one of the local radio talk shows it was like listening to the militant ethnic stations back when King got shot. Very bad vibes. Lots of inflammatory rhetoric on both sides. So we're kind of all on-hold this morning. Just waiting to see where it goes from here. And there's more."
“What?"
“Your new best friend Noel Collier was on the news this morning. Jones-Seleska made it official. They are the attorneys of record for William Hackabee, suspect in"—he looked at the front page on the desk—"the Dallas Gravedigger Murders, according to sources, yatta, yatta, yatta, represented by defense counsel Noel Collier of the Garland law firm of blah blah and so on.” He tossed the paper on his desk and Jack picked it up with a shrug.
“No big surprise, I guess.” He pointed at the phone. “Can I use it?” And at Michaels’ nod he picked up the handset and dialed Jones-Seleska. He had to hold for a minute or so but she finally came on the line and that angelic voice told him it was “Noel Collier."
“Jack Eichord.” A beat. Nothing. “You missed a good spaghetti dinner,” he just couldn't resist it.
“Mmm.” It sounded like she murmured. “Kind of running today, Mr. Eichord. Can we do something for you in particular?” Voice hardening like a tempered blade.
“Congratulations on your new client,” he said.
“Um hmm. Thank you."
“Wish you had told me when I was in your office."
“How's that?"
“I mean, that is the case we were talking about. I don't recall you saying your firm would be representing Mr. Hackabee. But I see it's in the papers today."
“Mr. Eichord"—the tone a little irritated now—"I think we need to clarify a couple of things here to avoid future misunderstandings between your offices and ours. First off, that decision was only finalized late yesterday, and the papers were notified by someone else here in the office. I am unaware of any agreement that was made to notify you. Second. The basic purpose of a defense attorney is to defend the accused and so that presupposes that there is a basic conflict of interest between that person and the police and DA or whoever prosecutes. It's a bad-guy-good-guy situation depending on your perspective and it was meant to be that way. The adversarial position is what makes the system cook. You agree?"