Iceman Read Online Free

of the poisonous air in the car, and rain was hitting him in the face. “How the hell you ever get hold of a detective's shield?"
    “Just lucky,” the incredible, corpulent hulk riding beside him said. “I was the fourth caller on Name It and Claim It ."
    “Uh huh. But for real, man. How the fuck did you get a detective's shield, as fuckin’ STUPID as you are?"
    “I'm glad you axed me that, Monroe. I stole it off a dead nigger."

Vega, 1955
    T he boy-child was slipping off the mountain. Even though he was still a child in years, with a child's absence of morality, he was already possessed of a burning intelligence that told him how different he was.
    And inside his mind he could see himself going off the deep end, over the high side, down the cliff. See himself caught in the throes of something dark and tenacious and deliciously forbidden and all-consuming. But the human mind is such that it will attempt to block out the imputations of anything remotely resembling encroaching insanity.
    So he went with it. Gave himself over to its pull. And in that mind he created fantasy hideouts and magical escape routes. Great, safe havens in which he could hide from the laughter and cruelty downstairs. Safe hideouts from the overpowering urges that came and held lit matches to his groin and then made him do the bad things to his sister, to the child down the block, to himself.
    And the boy-man constructed wonderful secret rooms inside his strange and frightening mind where he could go, always late at night, tuning in the faint signals of security as you tune in the sound of a distant station over late-evening radio. And in fact he would huddle into a fetal ball with total concentration, straining to hear the voices of escapism from the old Fada's tinny speaker.
    Late in the night, when the last mysteries and horror tales were over, he'd switch from the network stations to the local stations in nearby Amarillo. And he'd lie there for hours with the midnight dance bands soothing him, playing lullabies in the darkness, as his imagination would concoct complex fantasies of revenge, release, and escape. And they nurtured and comforted him, these evil and dark thoughts, rendering him invisible and all-powerful, a man-child going all the way over the edge into a kind of controlled madness.

South Blytheville, Arkansas
    M rs. Alvarez, distraught and shaking, proved to be totally worthless. They had ended up meeting at the cop shop at eight a.m., and she sat in a small interview room, hugging herself and always appearing to be on the verge of shivering, as she numbly took Eichord over the ground she'd trod a dozen times in the past seventy-two hours. She was not going to go back to work until she found the kids.
    Angela and María were, by all evidence, sweet, adorable kids without enemies. She never let either of them go out alone on the streets, even in the neighborhood, “so they'd never get into trouble.” Why couldn't the police find them? Juanita Alvarez kept asking. It was a question nobody could answer.
    He tried to take her down fresh avenues, doing what he always did, watching as much as listening. Because this was not about the kids, this interview. It was about Juanita Alvarez. And as he probed about school, church, and other affiliations, subtly moving the questions into more intimate areas, Eichord's sensors were picking up the mother's vibes. Unless she was one of those rare types of total sociopaths, or an extremely capable actress, this was a worried mother who didn't know where her missing children were.
    An hour and a half later he'd also had just about all he could take of one Pam Bailey, the fourteen-year-old who'd popped off to a pair of investigating officers about “that mean old coot who lives next door, bragging about getting even with rowdy brats.” She was a sullen, olive-skinned couch potato of a kid in an Elvis Is Still Alive sweatshirt. The neighbor, Mr. Hillfloen, had apparently complained to the manager