Walk away, Jack told himself. Your girlfriend dumped you and you’re in a rotten mood.
And as for carousels . . .
The abrupt descent of a mental lead curtain ended the debate about carousels. Feeling as though pushed from within, Jack stepped onto the pier and began moving through the crowd. He was half conscious of taking the most unprofessional action of his career.
When he had pushed his way to the front of the crowd, he ducked under the tape and flashed his badge at a babyfaced cop who tried to order him back. Somewhere nearby, a guitarist began playing a blues melody Jack could almost identify; the title swam to the surface of his mind, then dove out of sight. The infant cop gave him a puzzled look and walked away to consult one of the detectives standing over a long shape Jack did not quite feel like looking at just then. The music annoyed him. It annoyed him a lot. In fact, it bugged the hell out of him. His irritation was out of proportion to its cause, but what kind of idiot thought homicides needed a sound track?
A painted horse reared, frozen in the garish light.
Jack’s stomach tightened, and deep in his chest something fierce and insistent, something at all costs not to be named, flexed itself and threw out its arms. Or extended its wings. The terrible something wished to break free and make itself known. Briefly, Jack feared he would have to throw up. The passing of this sensation bought him a moment of uncomfortable clarity.
Voluntarily, idly, he had walked into craziness, and now he was crazy. You could put it no other way. Marching toward him with an expression nicely combining disbelief and fury was a detective named Angelo Leone, before his expedient transfer to Santa Monica a colleague of Jack’s distinguished by his gross appetites, his capacity for violence and corruption, his contempt for all civilians regardless of color, race, creed, or social status, and, to be fair, his fearlessness and utter loyalty to all police officers who went with the program and did the same things he did, which meant anything they could get away with. Angelo Leone’s disdain for Jack Sawyer, who had not gone with the program, had equaled his resentment at the younger man’s success. In a few seconds, this brutal caveman would be in his face. Instead of trying to figure out how to explain himself to the caveman, he was obsessing about carousels and guitars, attending to the details of going crazy. He had no way of explaining himself. Explanation was impossible. The internal necessity that had pushed him into this position hummed on, but Jack could hardly speak to Angelo Leone of internal necessities. Nor could he offer a rational explanation to his captain, if Leone filed a complaint.
Well, you see, it was like someone else was pulling my strings, like another person was doing the driving . . .
The first words out of Angelo Leone’s fleshy mouth rescued him from disaster.
—Don’t tell me you’re here for a reason, you ambitious little prick.
A piratical career like Leone’s inevitably exposed the pirate to the danger of an official investigation. A strategic sidestep to a neighboring force offered little protection from the covert archaeological digs police officials mounted into records and reputations when the press gave them no other choice. Every decade or two, do-gooders, whistle-blowers, whiners, snitches, pissed-off civilians, and cops too stupid to accept the time-honored program got together, rammed a cherry bomb up the press’s collective anus, and set off an orgy of bloodletting. Leone’s essential, guilt-inspired paranoia had instantly suggested to him that L.A. Homicide’s ace boy might be gilding his résumé.
As Jack had known it would, his claim of having been pulled toward the scene like a fire horse to a fire magnified Leone’s suspicions.
—Okay, you happened to walk into my investigation. Fine. Now listen to me. If I happen to hear your name in some connection I don’t like anytime during the next six months, make that ever, you’ll be pissing through a tube for the rest of your life. Now get the fuck out of here and let me do my job.
—I’m gone, Angelo.
Leone’s partner started to come forward across the gleaming pier. Leone grimaced and waved him back. Without intending to do so, without thinking about it, Jack let his eyes drift past the detective and down to the corpse in front of the carousel. Far more powerfully than it had the first time, the ferocious creature at the center of his chest flexed itself, unfurled, and extended its wings, its arms, its talons, whatever they were, and by means of a tremendous upward surge attempted to rip free of its moorings.
The wings, the arms, the talons crushed Jack’s lungs. Hideous claws splayed through his stomach.
There is one act a homicide detective, especially a homicide lieutenant, must never commit, and it is this: confronted with a dead body, he must not puke. Jack struggled to remain on the respectable side of the Forbidden. Bile seared the back of his throat, and he closed his eyes. A constellation of glowing dots wavered across his eyelids. The creature, molten and foul, battered against its restraints.
Lights reflected on the scalp of a bald, black man lying dead beside a carousel . . .
Not you. No, not you. Knock all you like, but you can’t come in.
The wings, arms, talons retracted; the creature dwindled to a dozing speck. Having succeeded in avoiding the Forbidden Act, Jack found himself capable of opening his eyes. He had no idea how much time had passed. Angelo Leone’s corrugated forehead, murky eyes, and carnivorous mouth heaved into view and, from a distance of six inches, occupied all the available space.
—What are we doing here? Reviewing our situation?
—I wish that idiot would put his guitar back in its case.
And that was one of the oddest turns of the evening.
—Guitar? I don’t hear no guitar.
Neither, Jack realized, did he.
Wouldn’t any rational person attempt to put such an episode out of mind? To throw this garbage overboard? You couldn’t do anything with it, you couldn’t use it, so why hold on to it? The incident on the pier meant nothing. It connected to nothing beyond itself, and it led to nothing. It was literally inconsequential, for it had had no consequences. After his lover had sandbagged him Jack had lost his bearings, suffered a momentary aberration, and trespassed upon another jurisdiction’s crime scene. It was no more than an embarrassing mistake.
Fifty-six days and eleven hours later, the ace boy slipped into his captain’s office, laid down his shield and his gun, and announced, much to the captain’s astonishment, his immediate retirement. Knowing nothing of the confrontation with Detective Leone on the Santa Monica Pier, the captain did not inquire as to the possible influence upon his lieutenant’s decision of a stalled carousel and a dead black man; if he had, Jack would have told him he was being ridiculous.
Don’t go there, he advises himself, and does an excellent job of not going there. He receives a few involuntary flashes, no more, strobe-lit snapshots of a wooden pony’s rearing head, of Angelo Leone’s distempered mug, also of one other thing, the object occupying the dead center of the scene in every sense, that which above all must not be witnessed . . . the instant these imagistic lightning bolts appear, he sends them away. It feels like a magical performance. He is doing magic, good magic. He knows perfectly well that these feats of image banishment represent a form of self-protection, and if the motives behind his need for this protective magic remain unclear, the need is motive enough. When you gotta have an omelette, you gotta whisk eggs, to quote that unimpeachable authority, Duke Wayne.
Jack Sawyer has more on his mind than the irrelevancies suggested by a dream voice’s having uttered the word “policeman” in baby talk. These matters, too, he wishes he could send away by the execution of a magic trick, but the wretched matters refuse banishment; they zoom about him like a tribe of wasps.
All in all, he is not doing so well, our Jack. He is marking time and staring at the eggs, which no longer look quite right, though he could not say why. The eggs resist interpretation. The eggs are the least of it. In the periphery of his vision, the banner across the front page of the La Riviere Herald seems to rise off the sheet of newsprint and float toward him. FISHERMAN STILL AT LARGE IN. . . . Nope, that’s enough; he turns away with the terrible knowledge of having brought on this Fisherman business by himself. How about IN STATEN ISLAND or IN BROOKLYN, where the real Albert Fish, a tormented piece of work if there ever was one, found two of his victims?