Unthawing Ghosts
This passage from Reversible Errors is from the point of view of Larry Starczek the detective, at the murder scene. He is looking at the three victims who have been left in a large restaurant freezer:Larry was the first to say that he was a little witchy about the entire process of investigation, but he wasn't alone. Half the murder dicks he knew confessed, after a couple of whiskeys, to occasionally feeling the guiding presence of ghosts. He couldn't claim to understand it, but evil on this scale seemed to set off some kind of cosmic discord. For whatever it was worth he often started with an instant of solemn communion with the victims.
As always, at this moment, Larry was intensely aware of himself. This was his profession. Murder. Like everybody else, he thought about buying a new garden hose and the line on tomorrow's hockey match, and how he could get to both boys' soccer games. But as some point every day, he snuck into the mossy cave of murder, to the moist thrilling darkness of the idea.
He had nothing to apologize for. Murder was part of the human condition. And society existed to restrain it. To Larry, the only more important job than his was a mother's. Read some anthropology, he always told civilians who asked. All those skeletons unearthed with the stone ax still right in the hole? You think this just started? Everyone had murder in him. Larry had killed. In Nam. God knows who he'd shot blowing off his M-16 in the darkness. The truth was he knew the dead on his own side far better. But one day, during his brief time on patrol, he'd tossed a grenade down a tunnel and watched the ground give way and the bodies come flying up in a fountain of dirt and blood. The first man was launched in pieces, a trunk with one arm, the legs airborne alone. But the other two men exploded from the earth intact. Larry still recalled them flying through the air, one screaming, the other who was probably out cold, with this expression that you could only call profound. So this is it, the guy was thinking - he might as well have held up a sign. Larry still saw that look all the time. He beheld on the first victim's face now, the largest thing in life - death - and it filled Larry on each occasion with the exacting, breathless emotion of one of those perfect realist paintings you'd see in a museum - Hopper or Wyeth. That thing: this is it.
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