Read Online Iceman by Rex Miller - Free Book Online

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
    T he 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