The Killer Is Dying (14 page)
WHEN HE TOOK THE CHILI to Mrs. Flores, she’d insisted on dishing it into one of her own bowls and sending his bowl back home with him. Jimmie stood by the kitchen door waiting. Her friend Felix was sitting at the kitchen table with a glass and a bottle of liquor. Jimmie had never seen that except in movies. Felix asked how his hand was, how he was doing.
Chili was about the only thing his father ever cooked. He’d make gallons of it in this big cast-iron pot and they’d live for a week off that and boxes of crackers, which the old man always called saltines. Jimmie still liked the chili but he didn’t fix it much, and he always wound up throwing a lot of it away.
He wondered if Felix and Mrs. Flores would really eat it.
Chopping onions and peppers and all had been a little scary at first, and he figured it to be that way for a while. Early this morning he’d been awakened by his hand hurting. Then when he held it up, he realized that it wasn’t hurting at all; he’d been dreaming that it hurt. He didn’t remember much of the rest of the dream. He was in a room somewhere, blond furniture squared against the walls, pictures above, flowers, mountains, bodies of water—what he imagined a motel room might look like.
And lizards. There were lizards in his dream. Now he remembered that.
They were everywhere: on the ceiling above him, silhouetted in the window against light from outside, peering over the edge of picture frames. All of them perfectly still.
The other day, after he read to the old folks at the hospital and was packing up to go, Mrs. Drummond approached him to say they were having a holiday get-together for everyone and she hoped that Jimmie and his parents would come. It would be so
nice
, she said, pausing on the word, to get the chance to meet them, and to tell them how much Jimmie’s work there was appreciated.
Duck and run time.
He had to wonder if he was growing careless, complacent, taking too much for granted. And all at once he had remembered his father saying “That’s how they get you, boy. Nice home, cushy job, comforts.” It was the flip side of his old man’s other habitual diatribe: “They keep you under their thumb, boy. Always pushing, always bearing down, till you can’t move, can’t breathe.”
Leaving the hospital, he had passed a sign in the hallway, yellow and black,
Danger
at the top,
Hazardous Materials Area
and
Authorized Personnel Only
to the right beside a circle enclosing a slashed-out human figure. It occurred to him then that much of what parents tell children is hazardous material and should come with such warning labels.
This was one of those days when nothing felt right. Dreams. Lizards. His bedclothes looked like something that had been used to wrap leftover food. Even the house seemed vaguely unfamiliar when he came in from running the chili down to Mrs. Flores. He supposed that making the chili had been his try to get things back the way they were. And he wondered how much of the world’s activity was aimed toward trying to get things back the way they were—or back the way people imagined things were.
The kitchen, of course, was a mess. And that was something he could fix.
Half an hour later there’s a rack full of clean dishes, the hot water heater out in the utility room’s thumping as it recharges, there are pools of water on counter and floor, and he doesn’t remember any of it.
Kind of scary. Where had he been?
Then, slowly, it came back.
He was in a yard, then a house. Blankets folded and stacked on the couch, pillow with a pink pillowcase on top. Shelves packed with display dishes and knickknacks, paintings on the wall, long curtains at the windows. He walks through an arched doorway into the kitchen. Coffee makings, pans, empty cans in the trash, lunch meat and old eggs in the refrigerator. A table with stacks of paper, a computer, pens, a notebook. He is going through it all. Slowly going through it all.
He watches as his hands pull a legal pad toward him and write,
Please contact me. This is for you alone. I sell dolls.
HE BLINKED, trying to make sense of what he saw, what he thought he saw.
Dark shapes at the window, against the light. Like pods or small fish. Commas. Leaves. The f-holes of violins and guitars. Then, as his eyes moved from there to the wall and ceiling, more of them. Six, eight, a dozen. And one, he realizes now, on his hand. He lifts the hand slowly, moves it closer to his face, and the two of them watch one another. Its skin is cool and dry, tissue-thin, amazingly soft. With each breath its sides flare. He sees the tiny, intricate cage of ribs.
What a beautiful thing it is.
And so many of them, so many of these small beautiful things that fill the world around us, unnoticed, unacknowledged, unseen.
He remembered the kid saying “Hope you like lizards.”
Well, yeah.
Popping the top off his last orange juice, he did the same with the computer, gulped as it booted up. Just past dawn, six or a little after, maybe? So that was the most sleep he’d had in a single stretch for a while. Odd that he hadn’t needed desperately to pee when he woke up. He checked his feet and ankles. A little swelling, not a lot more than normal. Hand shaking some, he’d noticed that earlier with the lizard, but if there was discoloration, jaundice, he couldn’t see it.
The lizards had begun retreating.
Because he was up and moving around? Or because they had duties to attend to?
Geckos. Amazing little creatures. Feet an absolute marvel of nature’s trial-and-error engineering. That many in plain sight, there’d be nests, in the walls, or right outside. A single parthenogenetic female could populate an island. New ones were tiny—tadpole-size. They moved like mercury, tails often left behind with confused attackers as they sped away.
And now, a confused attacker was what he himself had become.
All those years, he never much pondered what he did. What it meant, what he left behind as he walked away. He’d known early on, from navigating the situation at home and from his reading, that he was a problem solver. That’s what life was, a string of problems to be solved. And what he did for
his
living, from inception through planning to execution—from start, to had to, to happen—that was no different.
But this time the
had to
hadn’t happened.
Problem.
And he still hadn’t peed. God help him if his kidneys were shutting down. He turned to look out the window where the morning built slowly, filling itself with the sound of cars and birds and garage doors and shouting children.
God help him
.
How had that got in his head? Not a metaphor he owned—for all his belief that we understand our world and guide our lives by metaphors, that we can scarcely think without them.
What of animals, then? Did they think abstractly? When animals played—was that abstract thought? Obviously, from the paw twitches and changes in breathing as they slept, they dreamed. The smells surrounding it were a dog’s metaphors.
Did the gecko sit on the ceiling remembering where it was born, the warmth, other bodies? Did it think how it lost its tail, wonder how long before the new one grew, even as it waited for the fly to land within striking distance?
—And exactly where, he thought, looking back at his hands to resurface, did all
that
come from?
He reached again to probe at his ankle and decided to let it be.
Back in country he’d served as de facto medic. Everyone came to him with their complaints and questions, wanting advice: rash and athlete’s foot, sores, shrunken dicks, swollen dicks, constipation, bleeding gums, hangnails, torn muscles, night sweats. Not much he or anyone else could do about most of it.
Just like this.
For so long, time held no meaning for him, one day like another, years little more than a jumble of passing seasons. Now time was solidifying around him.
You grow up hearing these things people are saying over and over all around you,
He’s a good man
,
It’s in her blood
,
I should have known
,
Live and let live
, and you never give them much thought. They’re just
there
, like rocks or walls or sky. Then one day you stop and think, What the hell’s that mean? The one that always got him was
Everything happens for a reason
.
Sure it does.
He shouldered his attention back to the computer, cruising the sites that, bone-weary and distracted, he’d given up on last night, after the kid left. The two older messages inquiring about dolls were there, of course.
And interestingly enough, crowded up against those at both sites, this one:
Special doll for sale.
The one you’ve been looking for.
THEY’D BEEN OUTSIDE Rankin’s house going on five hours now. Situation like this, you used up conversation topics pretty fast, not that they hadn’t already, all these years they’d worked together. So they were sitting there silently. Graves was thinking about Sayles’s wife, and about an old case.
He got dispatched to a house out in Mesa where the kid, fourteen or so, had been refusing to eat, claiming it was to purify himself or somesuch thing. He was so weak he couldn’t get out of bed, looked like a praying mantis with a human face. The kid’s sister, three years younger, had dialed 911. Uniforms responded, saw what was going on, and called back in for a detective. Over the following days Graves had watched parents, doctors, and courts fight over whether the kid could and should be force-fed. They were still fighting when, at the hospital, the kid picked up an infection that took him out.
Graves unscrewed the cap off a bottle of Arrowhead water, took a slug. Offered it and put the cap back. “We don’t have a clue what we’re looking for.”
“Nope.”
It wasn’t much of a connection, but for the time being it was what they had. Maybe the guy the paramedics had picked up out here, the one who went AWOL at the hospital, was involved, maybe he was the one they were looking for. Dollman. Maybe he’d return. Maybe he was already here.
Maybe their pockets had big holes in them.
All told, it was a quiet neighborhood. Mainly Anglo, so not much life on the street, houses closed off, yards empty. Just people dodging from house to car and back, the odd few out mowing or whacking weeds. Guy five houses over working in his garage with the door cranked open, classic rock seeping from a cheap boom box.
A kid went by on his bike, backpack laced onto the handlebars. An old bike, looked like one Graves himself might have had as a kid, not one of these spiffy new things with a dozen gears and skinny-ass tires. In truly great shape, though. Kid probably ought to be in school, Graves thought; then thought that it wasn’t any of his business.
Half hour or so later, without saying anything, he and Sayles watched an older man come around the southeast corner and walk slowly down the sidewalk on Rankin’s side. He was wearing a light summer suit, or a sportcoat and slacks, and limping. Going past the house, no pause, no change, he continued on around the long curve and out of sight.
Graves turned on the radio low. Sayles glanced his way but didn’t say anything.
“Give it another hour and pack it in?”
“Okay by me,” Sayles said.
Guy on the newscast was going on about this holiday tragedy, how some family’s father got laid off with a wife in the hospital and three young kids at home. Yeah, right, Graves thought. Tragedy. Tragedy was about fatal flaws, about bottoming out emotionally, physically, spiritually. Tragedy was a twelve-year-old killed by gangs on his way to school, the eighty-year-old judge who’d sat thousands of cases and now couldn’t remember where or who he was. You had air space to fill, it got filled—like gas filling whatever container it’s put into. And knowing how insignificant most of it was, you cranked it, shifted to hyperbole, smeared lipstick on the pig. This guy? Pitiable, yes. But a couple towns over from tragic.
“It would help if we had some idea what we’re looking for,” Graves said.
“And how often does that happen, that we know what we’re looking for?” Sayles reached over and turned off the radio. “But in this case it’s quite conceivable that we’re looking for a Honda”—he nodded toward the tan car pulling abreast of them—“that went by at 9:36 and again at 13:42.”
Single occupant, male, brown hair. Sayles was scribbling the plate number on the pad clipped to the dash. “Be a good time to have a cam—”
Graves held up his cell phone. “Got it.”
The plate went with a rental from National—not the Honda.
“Now there’s a surprise,” Sayles said.
The car itself matched four recently reported missing, including one from long-term parking at Sky Harbor.
“Okay, two surprises.”
Sayles was peering out at the long, almost empty room. He had a way of doing that, Graves thought, like he’d suddenly surfaced from somewhere else. “Where the hell is everyone?”
“Holiday. Everyone the bosses figure we can do without is home.”
“Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”
“About what?”
“The bosses, to start with. Then about how much work actually gets done around here.”
“Guess it could … We want to put the plate and vehicle out there?”
“Yes.”
Graves picked up the phone.
“No.”
He put it back.
“This guy took the car from long-term parking, not a glitch, not a wobble. Grabbed plates somewhere else and swapped them. What’s that tell us?”
“He gets things done.”
“Right. He’s the guy we’re looking for. Has to be.”
“But you don’t want a flag up?”
“He knows how things work, he probably knows a lot about what we do, too. Right now the car’s all we have. Let’s not give him a push to ditch it.”
“So, what? We take up full-time residence outside Rankin’s house, wait for this guy to cruise by?”
“Maybe.”
“Okay. What’s plan B, then?”
“Hell if I know.”
As they talked, Graves had been rummaging in his computer. Now his fingers paused on the keyboard.
“Here’s another surprise.”
“Okay.”
“A posting just like what we put up, advertising a doll for sale. ‘One of the rarest, maybe one of a kind.’ ”
“Our man?”
“It doesn’t feel like it, does it?”
“If it’s not him, not Dollman, then who is it?”
“Someone looking for him? Same as we are.”
He felt it the minute he walked in.
All the drive home this thing had been turning over and over in his head.
Same as we are
, Graves had said. Maybe so, maybe not—which described this whole mess, start to finish. Rankin was alive, but someone, for some reason, was dogging him. Maybe the shooter, maybe not. They had the car, the Honda, that the someone was in—and which could disappear at any moment. And then there was Dollman, who had seen it—seen something—go down. Was he part of it? Maybe so, maybe not. And these ads. Did they mean anything? Or were they just another dead end?
Round and round. Over and over. He was still thinking about it when he opened the front door.
Then he wasn’t.
Because he felt the change then.
There was nothing different about the room. His neat stack of blankets and pillows remained on the couch. Room tidied up, but the carpet unswept for some time now, a haze of dust on shelves and knickknacks. That familiar musty, long-unaired smell.
She was in the kitchen, sitting at the table. The nurse he’d met at the hospice stood off a bit, near the refrigerator, and nodded. He stopped in the doorway.
“You’re keeping late hours, Dale.”
“As always.”
“You remember Judy Zelazny. She’s off duty, but when I told her my thoughts, she insisted upon bringing me.” Her hands were in her lap. She had lost more weight. The blue bandanna on her head matched the blouse she was wearing. “The old year is almost gone, Dale. I wanted to come and thank you for it. And to wish you a happier new one.”
“I could have come—”
“I needed it to be here, in our world, Dale. Not there.”
“I understand.”
“You always did.”
She stood, hands on the table, then straightened and walked toward him. He could see that Ms. Zelazny’s impulse was to step up and help, but she pulled back. Josie came to him and he held her. He felt the curve of her ribs, like a boat’s hull, felt her heart beating just beneath the skin. There was so little left of her.
“I miss you,” he said. And feeling her tremble, helped her back to the chair.
“I’ll wait in the other room,” Ms. Zelazny said.
So much came back to him, so many memories in a flood—he could see the same in her eyes—and yet, so little to say. He sat watching her chest heave as she caught her breath.
“I have to get back soon,” she said. “It’s good to see you smile.”
“A few more minutes …”
“There are always a few more minutes, Dale.”
Not always, he would think later as he watched Ms. Zelazny’s van pull away. But for now there was small talk: others at the hospice, how was Graves doing, the crazy neighbor who the whole time they’d been in the house had kept building a fence and tearing it down, the bar that just reopened under new management for the fourth time this year up the street, the young woman in a long dress and plain dark clothes she watched go by each day outside her window.
Then she was gone. He sat on the couch, not really thinking, not really remembering, just
there
, floating, strangely free. He heard cars pass, someone blowing wildly into a trumpet or trombone, a moth buzzing at the window, what sounded like thunder far off, blood pounding in his ears. When he looked up, it was morning and Graves stood by the open front door.
