Stone Shadow Read Free

flog $350 suits off him. Must make his day."
    “Make my day, mother-fuckers,” a huge man boomed from the stairway. It was fat Dana Tuny, called “Chunk” Tuny throughout Buckhead Station, and the longtime partner of James Lee—known as the legendary homicide team of Chink and Chunk.
    “Hay -ZOOS! It stinks like a mother-grabber down here. I gotta get a straight goin’ to cut the smell.” The big detective grabbed a cancer stick out of his partner's pack and lit it with a gold Dunhill, letting out a huge plume of foul carcinogens.
    “Morning, asshole,” Lee said to him. “I was just telling Eichord he looked like shit."
    Eichord nodded hello.
    “That's no lie, Jack. You look like fuckin’ walking death, man, whatsa matter witcha—you on the sauce again?"
    Eichord laughed. “Real subtle, Dana."
    “I just got done tellin’ him, man. He better cut back a couple of quarts a day."
    “Well, girls,” Tuny said, shifting his poundage from his partner's back, “I'm goin’ across the street. You guys want some doughnut holes?"
    When he'd gone back up the stairs, Lee said softly to Eichord, “All the ha-ha aside, you do look bad and you are drinking too much, and if I know YOU gotta know, not being the type who kids himself."
    “You can't imagine how much these free consultations help me, Doctor. How long have you practiced? Not counting today.” But underneath the bantering Eichord was well aware of what his longtime friend and colleague was trying to say so subtly: he did look like shit and he wasn't getting enough sleep and he was crankier than he had any reason to be, and the thing was, he was drinking too much and he could feel himself slipping into the big black hole again. Its power was sucking at him, pulling him mercilessly down into the viscid swamp that all alcoholics got to know so well. It was like a club where you had an honorary lifelong membership.
    Cassarelli was just a name on a stiff's corpse—the shop name for a case that had ended like so many others, with what Eichord thought of as a tap dance. In this case, a legal tap dance where the victim fed the worms and the bad guys walked. Of course it was never that simple. Nothing was ever simple, clear-cut, open and shut, black and white, dead-bang. Everything had to be a big, complicated, unresolved, dragged-out, mishmash where lawyers and judges grew wealthy on the mind-battering, maddening opaqueness and inequities of turnstile justice.
    He had thought more than once that he'd put “tap dancer” on his next 1040 form. Let the fucking IRS chew on that one. That's the way he thought of himself. Tagged as a quasi “serial murder expert,” a misnomer that the press resurrected from time to time whenever media could stir up some numbers with a good, juicy crime story, he was perceived in-house as the ultimate tap dancer. A glorified PR man who could present a public face to media that offered a bit of both worlds, the public-relations stroke job in tandem with a credible body that was actually out there in the trenches.
    They used him and he supposed he used the limelight himself, if not for the ego nurturing for the perks of the job that came from the added clout. Grease that could lubricate implacable, rusty cogs of bureaucracy and business. Muscle to open or close doors, wedges, chisels, tools to break loose long-submerged facts in the information log jam. A high profile to draw out a certain kind of potential informant who would be pulled to the aura of celebrity like moths to the candle.
    But at what point do you expose so much of yourself to media that your life begins to be a kind of comic book? His endless stories about Dr. Demented, the whacko dentist whom he'd nailed because of a sick junkie informant, and the big case that had taken him from Buckhead Station north to Chicago, the Lonely Hearts murders, he'd talked about all these ancient crimes so often the memories had become illusory and unreal. Had they occurred at all?
    “You