The Killer Is Dying (10 page)
FROM ACROSS THE STREET he watched John Rankin hobble out the side door by the carport and stand in his robe and bare feet. The man had survived the gunshot, would have recovered in short order, but the cardiac arrest had drained him, tapped his body out. You could see the exhaustion in his walk, defeat in the slump of his body. Even at this remove, his skin looked gray. So they’d brought him around, but the heart had been damaged. And once the heart stopped, other organs started sliding south, so he probably had further damage, could be easing into kidney failure. Maybe even a touch of brain dysfunction, to judge by the slight drag of his left foot. A light stroke—or anoxia.
We spend as little time as possible dwelling on the shambles we’re likely to become, and for good reason. TV, movies, they save the guy’s life, the last you see of him he’s getting rolled out of the hospital in a bright chrome wheelchair. Never mind that he can’t feed himself, that his constant drool is so nasty it eats through his shirts, or that he pees himself constantly in little geysers that smell of rot.
Strange neighborhood out here, five minutes from the city, felt more like small town than suburb. Homes with sagging roofs and vehicles parked in the yard abutted others with manicured lawns and monogrammed shutters. One family up the street apparently lived in a front yard packed with chairs, an old couch, children’s wading pools and toys, a table or two, multiple coolers. Walking by another, he wondered when he’d last seen window boxes with flowers in them.
Two days, and no sign of the wife. Social worker of some kind, he remembered. Maybe his information was wrong and they’d split up before this. Or maybe she couldn’t handle what happened, packed it in and walked. Single car, the year-old Hyundai that stayed in the carport. Rankin would come out, pick up the newspaper or look around, go in. Once he came back out right away and half-pulled, half-pushed the recycle bin to curbside. The bench under the picture window in front of the house was thick with spiderwebs. Rankin turned the TV on when he got up in the morning, turned it off when he went to bed for the night. Light flickered against the drapes, and as dark fell you could watch the screen through them.
Okay, so he
wasn’t
going to let it go.
Not that he had much idea what he was doing here, what he expected. Just he was paying attention, looking as always for the thing that didn’t fit.
Far as he could tell, the cop, Sayles, was out of the picture. He hadn’t expected much to come of that anyway, but hey, good for a try. Hadn’t found out anything more from him and didn’t look like he would. That left Rankin himself.
Christian had been watching for the better part of four days. If the guy’s life was nondescript before, now it had gone positively featureless. No visitors. No activity. No clothes other than T-shirt, boxers, and bathrobe, as far as he had seen. The TV went on, the TV went off. Lights did the same: living room, back bedroom, bathroom, kitchen. Simple points against which to graph a man’s life.
Of course, it wasn’t Rankin that he was watching.
The rental car smelled of stale fried food with an overlay of pine scent from someone’s misguided attempt to fix that. He’d looked at five or six before taking it. The others were spiff and clean and newish. This one wasn’t. He’d been out to check the neighborhood, knew what would fit in, what was likely to be noticed. He had a thermos of coffee, two sandwiches from a mom-and-pop convenience store, chocolate, an apple. A newspaper he could pretend to be reading should he draw anyone’s attention.
He was thinking how kids back in school, kids these days too, he was sure, always talked about being bored, and how he could never understand that. The way wind moved in the trees, the sheen of sunlight on glass or steel, a fly’s wings—everything was of interest. You just had to pay attention, you just had to
look
.
Reaching to roll down the window, he saw that his hand shook and swallowed one of the pills, followed it with coffee.
Evidence of kids everywhere here. The wading pools in the inside-out living room up the street, swing sets jutting above fences in backyards, bicycles in driveways, posters in windows.
Mr. Earll lived down the street from them when Christian was a kid. He was old, much older than the wife with whom he’d had two children. Old enough to be her father, everyone said, then paused before adding
or worse
. From Christian’s earliest memories, Mr. Earll had lived not in the house but in the garage around back, going in only for meals. Like he’d served his purpose and wasn’t of use anymore. Been a bachelor all his life and couldn’t get used to anything else, the kinder souls among them said. Had a TV out there, on which he watched all the comedies, Andy Griffith, Lucy, Danny Thomas, and never laughed. Maybe he went inside to sleep; Christian wondered. But he was always out there, and the TV was always on. Mr. Earll had been a teacher, taught science at the local high school for better than forty years. Yeah, the kids said, he’s so old he was around when they
invented
science.
Christian went to school with the younger brother, Jerry Earll, who acted like everything was perfectly normal back at the house. Hell, for him, it
was
normal. That age, we think whatever we see around us, that’s what there is. The old man died their junior year. His wife found him out there early one morning sitting in his ratty old recliner, TV on, nothing but a test pattern and static.
Christian’s eyes went to the tan Honda even before it turned into the street. He’d seen it, or one just like it, earlier today. Stock and boxy, three to five years old, no parking decals, bumper stickers, or other markers, local plate, tires good but had some miles on them. Single occupant. The Honda swung easily, unhurriedly, around the corner at Cumberland, headed his way. Christian picked up the newspaper.
Probably a neighborhood car, cutting through, cruising home. But as it reached Rankin’s house, he was sure the driver’s head turned that way, and turned back only after it was past. Then it was abreast of the rental. Three dents in the front fender spaced like on a pawn shop sign—so it
was
the car he’d seen earlier. Just as Christian lowered the newspaper, the driver looked his way.
Christian knew that face …
Suddenly dizzy, he put his head back on the seat. There was a moment when he felt the world spiraling down around him, contracting. Then nothing.
His left arm wouldn’t move.
His eyes opened to bright, bright lights. Water-stained tile ceiling. Faces. Then, in a rush, sounds.
“He’s coming up.”
“Sir, you’re all right, can you hear me?”
“I’m seeing redness and swelling by the IV site, Doctor.”
“Infiltrated?”
“Line’s patent. Reaction?”
“You’re in the hospital, sir. You passed out.”
“Ambye.”
“What?”
“Otics.”
Someone leaned close. Coffee on her breath.
It was the antibiotics. For years never had a problem. Then, last time, his skin turned so red it looked like he’d been boiled, and hives the size of marbles broke out everywhere. Armpits, groin, even (he’d swear) inside his eyelids.
“No sign of anaphylaxis.”
“Resp’s steady at fourteen, sat ninety-four, BS good bilaterally.”
Christian lifted his head. The arm was strapped down, with two IVs running piggyback. He tried again:
“Antibiotics.”
“You’re allergic?” Lilt to the soft voice, an accent. Nigerian, maybe.
He nodded, remembering how the young resident had insisted that he was not allergic, merely sensitive, to the cephalosporin he’d been given. Still a little goofy from sedation, he’d drifted off thinking how he was now a sensitive male. When he woke again, thanks to steroids, the hives were gone.
“Can you tell us your name, sir?” Duh-duh-DA-duh-duh-DA-duh.
This time, too, he was still a little goofy. He tried to remember what name was on the ID he’d been carrying and couldn’t.
“Christian,” he finally said.
“I’m sorry, are you asking for a minister, sir?”
“Christian. My name.” All these years, even when he thought of himself that way, he’d never used the name. “What everyone calls me.”
“Oh, I see. And how are you, Christian?”
“Okay.”
“Can you tell us what happened?”
He shook his head.
“Are you diabetic?”
“No.”
“Have you a history of heart problems? Seizures?”
“No.”
“The EMTs brought in meds. These were in the automobile with you. You were taking these?”
“Yes.”
“One is prescription, a common pain medication, quite strong. The other, we cannot identify.”
Belgium. He’d flown there from Paris. A ground-floor flat on the waterfront that looked more like a library or professor’s study than a physician’s office. He remembered bright red and yellow flowers on tall stems in a vase at the window. Dr. Van Veeteren had a poorly repaired harelip. He smelled of rosewater and stale cigarette smoke.
“Lab work’s in, Doctor.”
The woman above him turned away, turned back holding a sheet of printout paper. He watched her eyes move down it, then shift to him. She said nothing, but the question was in her eyes.
“Yes,” he said. “I know.”
WHEN HE WOKE, he couldn’t feel his hand. Then he lifted it, into a faint burr of light from the window, and the pain started up. Not pain, really, more a simple insistence: rock in your shoe, the tooth you keep probing with your tongue. Blood had seeped into the bandage, turning it hard and crusty. It crackled when he pushed at it. There’ll be some leakage, the big-nosed doctor told him, blood, interstitial fluids—and scarring. But we’ll have to wait to see how much of that.
He had no idea what time it was. Dark, and he had slept, slept hard from the feel of it. For a moment when he first woke, he was disoriented, adrift, unsure where he was. Then the familiar sounds and light, the familiar smells, came to him.
Home.
Through the drapes (his mother, he remembered, always called them drapes, never curtains) he could see the moon, low in the sky, but he wasn’t really sure what that meant. Early in the night? Late?
She’d wanted to leave them open, believing that the strained, pale light from outside would comfort him. He’d asked her, many times, not to, and she said Okay, I understand, you’re a big boy now, but she always forgot. Once she was gone, he would close them.
He got up and switched the computer on, typing awkwardly. With the three good fingers of his left hand, and the bandaged one in the way however he held it, it was like a man walking with a clubfoot or with one leg shorter than the other, limping and pitching. He checked mail, then ran his usual sites, rifling through them automatically, Downer Loads, The Great Illusion, The Real Triangle, Traveler. He watched the screen, and at some level he was reading, but his thoughts were elsewhere.
The comfort his mother had thought he might take from that light, he found in the dark. He loved the way the dark closed around him, held him. Everything slowing, slowly growing still and quiet. He relished, thrilled at, put off for as long as possible the moment he would reach to turn off the light. Mystery, incalculable freedom, and safety all swaddled together in that moment, in that other, wholly private world opening to him.
But also, of late, the dreams.
Opening his eyes, he had not known where he was. A bright room, movement all around him. Woman’s face above his. Her lips were moving but there was no sound. No sound anywhere, though people walked past, doors open and shut, carts and equipment wheeled by. He lifted his head, looked down at the arm strapped in place, paper tape over needles and puffy skin. His feet, splayed in a lazy V, looked like they were a mile away. He was nude, only a towel draped over his midsection. And more than sound was missing: he couldn’t feel his body.
But of course it wasn’t his body.
There was a blank then, white space in the dream or in his memory of the dream, he didn’t know which, and when it clicked back in, he was making his way down a stairway. He’d got clothes somewhere, too small but wearable, and blood ran down his arm where the tape and needles had been. The lights out here were harsh, stark. A sign on the door at the bottom of the stairs read
EMERGENCY EXIT
AN ALARM WILL SOUND
and he stood there a moment in indecision. A man and woman came out onto the landing above, talking loudly, and paused before continuing upward. Their feet rang on the steel stairs.
He looked down at the body supporting him. This was the opposite of the comfort to be found in darkness. He was in a strange place, unsure of himself and surroundings, exposed, vulnerable …
Who
was exposed and vulnerable?
Jimmie tried to remember if he had ever before dreamed as someone else. Others in dreams changed, sure, the walk-ons, the companions, but weren’t people always themselves in their dreams?
No sense in putting this off. Whatever he was doing, he’d best be about it.
Choose.
Act.
The door had one of those lever bars on it. He touched it, ready to push, steeling himself for the alarm. The bandage was there, hard and crusty, on the hand at the end of someone else’s arm.
WHAT HE COULDN’T GET OVER, was his sense of violation.
The hallway was long and without windows, painted bright yellow in an attempt to counter the dimness and shut-in feel. Free-form paintings running low on the walls had been done by children from the local school, she’d told him. Lots of fat-bodied animals with stick-figure legs.
“I’m afraid I may have called you for nothing,” she said now. “And overstepped. Seriously overstepped?” She reached reflexively to push back her hair; either the close-cropped style was recent, or it was a habit she couldn’t shake. Her name tag read
Ms. Zelazny, RN
. She’d introduced herself on the phone as Judy. “I took it upon myself …” Her hand barely grazed his shoulder. “I am
so
sorry.”
“The important thing is, she’s better now.”
“Out of danger, as they say, yes. For the time being.”
“As they also say.” He looked in through the glass portion of the door. “What happened?”
“She stopped breathing. Her blood pressure bottomed out. Usually … You know that she refuses all medication? Accepts only basic care?”
He nodded. Now he knew.
“Once in a great while she’ll ask for a Tylenol. I think … I shouldn’t be saying this, but I think the pain just got to be too much for her. She gave up—just for a moment.”
The nurse was quiet then, giving him time. He could hear her breathing there beside him, almost feel the warmth of her skin.
“She said she didn’t want to fight this. In the note she left me. That it wasn’t in me to understand.”
“We don’t know what’s in us, do we? We think we do. Then …”
Sayles had conducted thousands of interviews. He knew when an explanation was coming. You could see the story starting up in their eyes, the shift in body balance, a certain charge in the air.
“My mother, my biological mother, died in a prison hospital. She was alone, surrounded by people she didn’t know, had no family to speak of. I’ve always wondered what she might have been thinking, there at the end. No one should …”
Elevator doors opened and a food cart rolled off. It made a terrible clatter and smelled of gravy.
“I shouldn’t have called, I’m sorry. It was not my place.”
“I’m glad you did. Thank you.” He looked back into the room. An aide was repositioning Josie on her side, tucking pillows behind and around. “It would be better if she doesn’t know I was here.”
“Yes. Yes, I suppose it might. If there’s anything …”
He smiled and started back down the hall, wondering what Judy Zelazny’s incomplete sentences, her trailings off, said about who she was, her connection to the world.
Outside, he watched a couple of dust devils skip and spin about the parking lot, then got in the car. He sat there a while, his thoughts skittering to and fro like the dust devils and every bit as insubstantial, nervous movement with no purpose, no purchase.
The moon hung high over Camelback, full and orange. Against scattered clouds he could see smoke gathering from a fire off to the west, industrial by the look of it, out by the White Tanks, maybe.
He got home with no memory of starting the car, or of the drive. Hung his sport coat on one of the hooks inside the kitchen door, pulled a beer from the refrigerator, and thumbed on the computer, thinking to read the news. Mostly he stayed off the computer at home, got enough of that on the job, but he’d canceled the newspaper months ago—they kept piling up outside, unretrieved—and was seriously in arrears with the world and its goings-on. Plus, he didn’t want to think. Not tonight.
But it wasn’t to be. In turn he attempted to focus on war news, financial news, political news, and sports news, and failed with each pass. Even the op-eds and columns seemed incomprehensible. As though it were all taking place in some land far removed from his own.
He had put the new glasses on and taken them off again repeatedly while surfing. Every time he got new ones, he went through a period when he was certain they’d done the prescription wrong, but this was worse than usual. He simply couldn’t or wouldn’t keep the damned things on. Stubbornness? Since, when it came right down to it, he saw fine with them.
He grabbed a second beer, went into the front room, and turned on the TV. His last possible refuge—but with the first light from the screen, memories of Josie, of her TV forever on, forever whispering, slammed into him. He clicked through channel after channel barely seeing what was before him, a Victor Mature movie, reruns of Kojak, religious programming, Hispanic stations, long-winded ads for exercise equipment, knife sets, and revolutionary cleaning supplies, before coming to rest at KAET. A nature show about, of all things, the mating patterns of insects. He sat watching, thinking vaguely that this world, the insect world, seemed to him no more alien than one in which people tried to sell memorial plates to insomniacs and day sleepers at three A.M.
The show about insects gave way to one about birds, and he remembered a story that had been passing around the station for years. Apocryphal, for all he knew, but the older cops swore by it. Happened way back, they said. This guy, just someone off the street, no one the family knew or anything like that, had killed a man and his wife and two kids in their beds. So next he goes into the kitchen and makes himself a sandwich. Eats it and puts on coffee. And while the coffee’s brewing, he goes through the house methodically killing the family pets. Scoops fish out of the tank and throws them on the floor, steps on them. Slits the dog’s throat with a chef’s knife from the kitchen. Strangles the parakeet. Next week, on a call from a neighbor, they find him in another house. Man and his son are dead, he’s in the kitchen eating a bowl of Cheerios. Hasn’t got to the dog or cat yet.
Sayles thought about how so many stories come down to good and evil, guy in the white hat and guy in the black, hawk and dove, this struggle between them, like one will win. You saw and read and heard that long enough, you started to believe it, started to think like that. But the bad stuff is right there with you, always. It’s the friend you’re walking down the street with, you’re both talking away, then he turns and there’s something different in his eyes, or in yours. And you both go quiet.
Sayles switched the TV off and sat listening to the sounds of the house around him, familiar sounds, comforting sounds, waiting for light to start up. It was out there somewhere in the night, feeling its way blindly toward him.
