Free Primal Scream by Michael Slade Page A

teeth.
    The shadow sliding up the bark near his face had a raised arm, the dark fist of which slashed a long blade in a wide arc toward the back of the neck of the nature artist.
    Then Cy was spinning like an acrobat in the air as blood fountained out of his headless body to splash and stain the snow, over and over and over until he plumped into a drift, cool crystals chilling the flush from his cheek, before a grasp as strong as that of death seized him by the hair, yanking his fading consciousness up to face Winterman Snow.
    "White man," the White Man said with contempt, and he spat in Cy's eye.

Fetish

    Vancouver

    Vancouver is a lumber town gussied up. It all began with Gassy Jack. Owner of the Globe Saloon in New Westminster, John "Gassy Jack" Deighton earned his nickname from an aptitude for fluent conversation when he was in his cups. The Fraser gold rush over, his bar went bust, so in 1867 he sailed downriver to Burrard Inlet for a new start. Arriving with an Indian wife, six dollars in cash, a yellow dog, and a barrel of whisky, Gassy built a pioneer shack in a grove of maple trees on a strip of firm ground with the muddy beach of the harbor in front and False Creek swamp behind. With half a dozen logging camps and two sawmills serving lumber ships, his saloon had a lock on thirsty throats, as it was a fifteen-mile walk to any alternative source of booze. Soon all wages earned were filling Gassy's coffers, and five paths led to his door in Gastown. First renamed Granville to give it class, then Vancouver after the British explorer who charted the coast, Gastown with five streets joining at Maple Tree Square remains the heart of the city, gazing over which is a statue of Gassy Jack.
    George Ruryk's office looked out on the statue and the square. Behind the building was Gaoler's Mews, site of the city's first jail.
    DeClercq was shocked to see how haunted the shrink seemed now. When they had worked together on the Headhunter case, he'd been a man of advancing years and growing reputation, a top professor in the Department of Psychiatry at UBC, who favored tweedy jackets with leather-patched elbows, wire-rim spectacles around owl-like eyes, and a Vandyke goatee befitting Freud. Robert's wife Genevieve had suggested he ask Ruryk to apply the FBI's new psych profiling science to the killer, so, because he trusted her opinion, he had. Though the Mounties now had ViCLAS—the Violent Crime Linkage Analysis System—to ferret out behavioral and psychological "signatures" in crimes coast to coast, and the Criminal Profiling Unit to read the signatures, something subconsciously drove him back to Ruryk, who had since left the university for private consulting here. Jekyll to Hyde, was that the effect of switching from academe's ivory tower to the real world? Whatever it was, something had changed the psychiatrist profoundly, for more than time had shriveled and shrunk the life out of him, turning his hair stark white as if from fear, while squinting his eyes with the tense gaze of a wretch who can no longer distance himself from the hell of his job.
    Haunted cops swallowed their guns.
    Haunted lawyers went berserk hi court.
    Haunted shrinks did what?
    Or were they haunted by what they did?
    When you look long into an abyss , Nietzsche wrote, the abyss also looks into you.
    "Skid road to skid road to skid road," said Ruryk. DeClercq walked in to find the psychiatrist staring out his office window at the rainy square. "A virgin forest turned skid road to move loggers' logs. Then this heart of the city turned skid road by the Depression. Gussied up in the sixties to reclaim its heritage. Then I watch it slowly slip back to skid road."
    "A never ending battle," agreed the cop. "A metaphor for what we do," said the shrink. DeClercq joined him at the window to gaze out over the square. A hump in the cobblestones marked the place where Gassy's tavern had stood, surmounted by the statue gf Jack standing on his barrel, and slumped at