Regina’s Song. David Eddings

idiot box,” Charlie told her. “Is the campus coming down with nervous?”

      “The girls in the dormitories are a little worked up, and Erika and I do spend quite a few evenings in on-campus libraries. If some screwball’s running around on campus, we might have to start taking a few precautions.”

      “From what I hear, the cops think it was one of those gang things,” Charlie told her. “Those aren’t usually dangerous for innocent bystanders—particularly when the guy who’s doing the killing uses a knife. It’s when they start shooting at each other that you have to take cover. City kids are rotten shots. What’s for dinner tonight, babe? I skipped lunch today, and I’m starving.”

      The ladies fixed pork chops that evening, and they were way out in front of anything you’d get in any local restaurant. James arrived a little late for supper, and the girls scolded him at some length. I mentally confirmed “don’t be late for supper” under my list of house rules.

      “Are you guys up for a jaunt over to the Green Lantern Tavern this evening?” Charlie asked James and me.

      “Here we go again.” Erika sighed, rolling her eyes upward.

      “We’re not going to get all bent out of shape, toots,” Charlie promised. “I want to have a talk with my older brother about that guy who got killed on campus last night. My brother’s a cop, and he’ll know a lot more details than we got from the news reports. He hits the Green Lantern just about every night on his way home from work. I can probably wheedle the story out of him. Then we’ll know whether it’s something we need to worry about.”

      James shrugged. “I don’t really have anything better to do,” he replied. “I’ll come along. I can count the number of beers you drink and rat you off to Trish when we get home.”

      “You wouldn’t!” Charlie said.

      “Only kidding, Charlie. Relax. I never fink on a buddy.”

      “Male bonding in action,” Sylvia said sardonically.

      “And Budweiser’s the glue in most cases,” Erika added. “Take ten guys and a keg of beer, mix well, and they’re stuck together for life.”

      “It’s one of those guy things, Erika,” I told her. “It crops up during hunting season—or just before the Super Bowl. I don’t watch football on TV, so I’m sort of an outcast. Well, gentlemen, shall we tiptoe off to the Green Lantern and abuse our livers?”

      Sgt. Robert West was a plainclothes detective with the Seattle Police Department, and he and his younger brother seemed to be fairly close, despite a pretty good number of differences between them. Charlie had bounced from job to job for a number of years, but Bob had taken aim at the Seattle Police Department when he’d been about fourteen, and he’d never even considered an alternate profession. He was a solid citizen with a wife, two kids, and a mortgage. He lived in the Wallingford district, and he customarily stopped by the Green Lantern after work for two beers—three on Friday, I learned later—then went on home. Charlie’d told James and me that you could set your watch by his brother. They looked quite a bit alike, but I doubt that Charlie even knew how to tie a necktie, while Bob wore one to work every day.

      After Charlie had introduced James and me to his brother, he got down to cases. “I don’t want you to bend any rules, big brother,” he said, “but we’d like to know if we ought to start wearing bulletproof vests to class. If the gangs are moving onto the campus, it could turn into a war zone. What’s the scoop on the guy who got knifed last night?”

      Bob looked at James and me. “This won’t go any further, right?” he asked us in a low voice.

      “It stops right here,” James assured him.

      “All right, then. The victim was a fairly high-ranking member of a Chicano gang, and somebody obviously wanted to pass a message on to his pals. What happened down by the lakeshore last night wasn’t your average, run-of-the-mill stab in the back. Somebody went to a lot of trouble to make it very messy.”

      “Who was the dead guy?” Charlie asked.

      “His name was Julio Muñoz, and his gang’s recently moved out this way to try to attract customers from the student body for various feel-good products. U.W. students have been doing dope for years, but they usually had to go to other neighborhoods to buy it. Julio and his buddies decided to set up a branch office in the university district. Evidently, another gang had the same idea, and they weren’t too happy about the notion of a price war.”

      “Any ideas about which gang decided to carve up Julio?”

      “Nothing very specific. Lieutenant Burpee thinks it might have been Cheetah, but Burpee’s sort of obsessed with Cheetah. He’s been trying to nail that one for about the last three years.”

      “Burpee?” James asked mildly.

      Bob smiled faintly. “We don’t call him that to his face. His real name’s Belcher.”

      “It does kind of fit, I guess,” James agreed.

      “Who’s this Cheetah?” I asked.

      “A downtown drug lord. He’s a mixed breed psychotic—part black, part Mexican, part oriental, part rabid bird dog. That’s one guy we’d really like to get off the streets. He swings big-time drug deals and amuses himself with random murders. We haven’t been able to pin him down because he hasn’t got a fixed address. He never sleeps in the same bed twice, and he’s got two or three hundred aliases. Muñoz had a rap sheet as long as your arm, but Cheetah’s never been busted, so we don’t even know what his real name is. We’ve got a rough description of him, and that’s about all. I sort of hate to admit it, but old Burpee might be right this time. Cheetah tends to be exotic, and the cutting last night was at least exotic. I’ve seen a few guys that were fairly well cut up, but whoever went after Julio scattered pieces of him all over the grass down by the lake. There’s no way an undertaker’s going to be able to put him back together again, so we’re probably looking at one of those closed casket funerals.”

      “You saw the body, then?” Charlie asked his brother.

      “I sure did. I got to the scene right after the uniforms did. That one’s going to give the coroner a real headache. Whoever took Muñoz out didn’t stab him the way most knife killers do. It was a carving, not a stabbing, and I’d guess that it took Muñoz a long time to die. It wasn’t for money, that’s certain. His wallet was still in his back pocket, and it was loaded.”

      “It was strictly a drug business thing, then?” James asked.

      “That’s our current thinking. Most of Julio’s arrests were drug-related. He’s been busted for that a half dozen times. He’s been a suspect in several shootings and a couple of rapes, but we could never pin him to the mat on those. We haven’t nailed him on a dope deal for over a year now, though. Evidently, he graduated from street dealing and moved up to being a supplier. There’s more money in that, I guess, but last night it looks like he came up against one of the occupational hazards of going big-time.”

      “The rubout?” Charlie guessed.

      “The slice-out in this case. I don’t think there was much rubbing involved. Whoever took him out might have had some experience as a meat cutter, since it sort of looked like he was trying to bone out the carcass even after Muñoz died.”

      “Homicidal maniac stuff?” Charlie asked.

      “Pretty much. It looked to me as if the cutter was pretty well worked up. We’ll probably have to wait for the autopsy to find out what kind of knife was involved. There didn’t seem to be any stab wounds. It was all slices. What’s surprising about it is that nobody in the vicinity heard anything. I’m sure it took Muñoz a long time to die, and nobody I’ve talked to heard any screaming. The only thing anybody heard was a dog howling.”

      “Then you don’t think anybody on campus had any kind of connection with the killing?” Charlie