The Killer Is Dying (3 page)
The dream, that he’d all but forgotten.
He took his hand away from his throat and went into the bathroom again. The moth had returned to the window, or another one had come, and beat against the glass outside. Briefly he imagined that he could hear the flutter of its wings, but of course he couldn’t. He imagined its small mouth making sounds.
HE HATED HOSPITALS.
Probably everyone hated hospitals. And most with good reason: horror stories passed down from generation to generation, memories of helplessness and of pain, their constant reminder of death, like an elbow in the ribs. But he didn’t hate hospitals as symbols, for something they represented, he hated them for themselves, for what they were. The entryways that always looked like bad movie sets, the lobbies smelling of cut flowers and overcooked food, the endless din of TVs and overhead pages, the molded plastic chairs, the workers clumped outside every exit smoking.
He’d awakened this morning with his shoes standing like two gravestones at the bed’s far end, surprised that he had slept, reaching in those first moments, with a curious mix of instinctive panic and exercised calm, to remember where he was.
Then, lying there still, to piece together the events of the day before.
A call to the hospital had gained Christian no information. Another of the grand paradoxes of contemporary life. Half an hour on the Internet and any reasonably competent skulker could have all manner of personal information about the person he’d been talking to, including his Social Security number. Yet in the name of privacy that person on the phone would not so much as tell him if the man was dead or alive.
“May I help you, sir?”
The woman who had come up on his left had to be at the hard end of her sixties. That leathery skin people out here got, shamble to her walk, spots and runnels on hands and arms. The orange candy stripes made her look like a rapidly aging teenager. There was something behind the ready smile that betrayed her too, a well of sadness waiting there. Her eyes kept slipping to the window ledge, where a family of six Hispanics sat eating from greasy paper wrappers.
He mumbled something about a daughter-in-law, a baby.
“Third floor. Take the second elevator, step off, and turn right. Yellow line on the floor leads to OB, blue to the nursery.” She smiled, fleshy hinges below her mouth hanging loose, clearly pleased that some matters could be cleanly dealt with, as her eyes went back to the window ledge.
There were three ICUs listed on the directory downstairs, the largest on the fifth floor, same as the operating rooms, and so the busiest. Where his man, if still alive, most likely would be. And where he himself would be the least conspicuous.
So much in life was about waiting. He took a seat, neither near the entrance nor too far away, in the waiting room, on one of six rows of chairs bolted to steel runners. Automatic double doors opened to the ICU itself; a similar but smaller set, to the hospital corridor. On the remaining walls TVs played, one tuned to a soap opera in Spanish, the other to a talk show whose elegantly dressed older man and scantily dressed young woman pursued with set faces the topic of grief. As he watched, a magician wearing an orange tuxedo replaced the soap opera. On the second TV a man with strawlike hair, face looming above the title of his new book, declaimed “The big bang, we now understand, was not the beginning of everything, only one of those things that happens from time to time.”
Through the glass wall he watched a stream of gurneys move down the hall, like planes taking their turn on the runway, to be gobbled up by doors to the OR and ICU.
Grief.
He supposed that for many, grief was like hunger, often spoken of, rarely if ever truly felt.
When he was nine or ten, on a long summer afternoon turning too slowly to evening, he had complained to his father that he was hungry. His old man had looked at him, clock on the mantelpiece ticking loudly. “
Are
you now, boy?” his old man had said. He’d spent the next three days without food. On the fourth his father came into his room. “Now,
that
’s hunger,” he said, handing over a tuna sandwich and so ending it. And just as slowly as that afternoon had turned to evening, over the years he’d come to understand that his father’s action was fueled not by cruelty but by unvoiced compassion; that the old man wanted him to experience deprivation, to know how it feels to be without the most basic elements of life.
He had read about Victorian women and fainting couches, remembered how in times of emotional stress the black women around whom he’d grown up would (as they called it)
fall out
. But grief? Grief was like the hunger he had known briefly that summer, something you could not get away from, a thing that took you over, wore you, used you.
Onscreen, one of the panelists was crying. The camera moved in for a close up. Her tear was the size of a grape.
Victims, he thought. We’re reared and taught to be a nation of victims. Lay the blame elsewhere. All the fault’s in the way I was brought up, my parents, DNA, chemicals in my food, some trauma from sixty years ago. Poverty. Racial lines. Glass ceilings. The big bad wolf: society. Two hundred years of that churned out nonstop, what surprise can it be that you wind up with two solid hours of courtroom whining every weekday afternoon on TV, shows about roommates and the awful things they do, people standing in line for talk shows to air their failures and abasements to an audience of like minds?
In the final hours his father had roused from near coma and looked up with a smile on his face. “I’m not hungry,” he said, “and I don’t hurt.” Almost in triumph. His mother had told him that. He hadn’t been there, hadn’t gone to the hospital at all. He’d been at home, all the lights off but that by his chair, unexceptional music on the radio, reading one of the medical texts he’d collected from secondhand bookstores.
He looked around now, at all these eyes waiting for it to have some meaning. Why she’s dying, why their kid got run over or shot, why they had so little time together, why he never took time to tell her so many things. Or maybe just waiting for the end.
He saw them the minute they came in, of course. Knew instantly who they were.
Not kids, the way damn near everyone looked to him nowadays. Both had some years on them. They wore dark dress slacks, the older a white shirt with sleeves rolled up and loosened tie, the younger a sport shirt. No coats. One pair of slacks was neatly pressed, the other baggy with use, its seat so compressed and shiny that it looked like satin. A doctor or nurse came out from the ICU to speak with them, and they followed her back through the doors.
So his man, John Rankin, was alive. And presumably able to talk, since detectives were here.
More waiting, then. More life.
It teemed about him. Children pushing cars with missing wheels up and down the plastic seats, women watching TV with mouths slack, men in denim shirts with the arms cut away, heads tilted back against walls stained by a hundred others. The smell of long-dried sweat and rut, bad food, bad breath.
At that thought, momentarily, he gagged, and felt his bowels flop like a fish.
Then he waited.
Twenty-six minutes by the clock hanging askew on the wall above the doors to the corridor. Focusing through the noise around him, he could hear the clock’s quiet heartbeat, see the hand lurch from second to second, catch, release, catch, release.
He waited as the detectives passed beneath the clock, into the corridor, then caught their escort just as the automatic ICU doors swung open.
“Miss …” He panted, as though just having arrived. “Could you tell … me. Those policemen …”
He motioned vaguely, walked to the nearest seat, and fell into it.
Cal Brunner, RN
. She followed him.
“Sir, are you all right?”
Head down, he nodded. In this case, gaining sympathy trumped keeping a low profile. And with luck she wouldn’t pause to ask for identification or to wonder how he knew they were policemen.
“Just give me … a minute. Those men … were they here to see my brother?”
“Mr. Rankin, yes.”
“Is he … okay?”
“He will be, yes.”
“Do they know what happened to him? The phone call …”
Again he fell silent, looking up into her face. She sank into the chair next to him, put a hand on his arm.
“You do know he was shot, don’t you?”
“But he’s … they said …”
“Yes. He
will
be okay. But he lost a lot of blood. He’ll need some mending, some time. Would you like to see him?”
He made a show of breathing deeply. “I can?”
“Of course.”
He followed her through the doors, expecting another corridor but finding a large open room half filled with wheeled carts, desktops, and machinery. An octagonal nurse’s station stood in the center, patient rooms along the outside. The rooms were triangle-shaped and reminded him of the pie charts they made him cut up back in school, when he was learning fractions. Rankin was in the fifth down. The room was pale green. A steel pan rested by the sink, gauze pads stained brown and yellow peeking over the top.
“Mr. Rankin’s fallen asleep again. Best to let him rest. Would you like to sit with him awhile? I can get you a chair.”
She did so, and he thanked her.
“I’ll be just outside, should you need anything.”
Rankin lay still, breathing faster than seemed natural for someone at rest, the skin of his face—all that could be seen—blanched and oily-looking. Four IVs hung above the bed, two of them Ringer’s, one blood, the other unidentifiable. An oxygen cannula snaked across the pillow to his nose. The monitor showed his heart rate at 82, BP 100/65, O
2
saturation 94 percent.
Sun shone through clouds that had foundered into place outside, giving the sky a bright, climactic cast. He could see, on the inside of the glass, dozens of fingerprints of others who had been here.
How many dead and dying men had he stood above or beside? And death, finally, wasn’t all that interesting. What was interesting, what never failed to surprise and amaze him, is the way life always holds on, whatever the circumstances, how it just won’t let go. Beetles on their backs with one leg left, and they’re using that leg, trying to use that leg, to pull themselves back upright and go on. Men hollowed out by cancer, men all used up, but the body just won’t turn loose, and drags them along.
Later he’d imagine that he felt death when it entered the room. He didn’t, of course, couldn’t have. Nor was he given to fancy. What people often mistook in him for intelligence was primarily an awareness of patterns and correspondences; he’d known that for a long time. And something, some small detail outside his ken but not his consciousness, had changed.
He looked up to the monitors again just as the alarms began sounding.
V-tach.
Then a shudder, the body ceasing breath as Ms. Brunner and another nurse pushed into the room moments ahead of the crash cart.
Walking to the sink, he picked up the business card with the shield on it tucked into the mirror there, and left.
“BREAK A LEG, right?”
He looked over at Graves, who was running his index finger around the inside of a yogurt container. Apparently the spoon couldn’t do the job. “Huh?”
“Break a leg—that’s what theater people say.” Graves licked the finger. “For good luck.” The container thunked, dead center, into the trash can.
“Only leg that’s likely to break around here is the desk leg from all the case files piled on it.”
“Brother, I feel your pain.”
“Sure you do. You feel like maybe doing a little work, too?”
“Guess somebody should.”
Sayles took off the new glasses and held them out to look at them. He wanted his old ones back.
Business as usual in the squad room. Phones ringing, people walking back to desks dripping coffee as they came, someone cursing his computer. Desk drawers sliding open and shut, bang of a file drawer slammed to. The file cabinets out here looked like something fast-tracked in an auto repair shop: dents halfheartedly hammered out, everything sprayed flat black. The bulletin board that no one ever looked at had memos on it going back to when Jimmy Carter was in office.
“So what do we think?”
“We think it looks like a hit—”
“But it’s not, because this guy’s not a player.”
“As far as we know.”
“And because it didn’t take. A professional wouldn’t drop the ball like that.”
“So maybe it’s not a hit.”
“Random.”
“Right. Not a robbery—”
“Or any other clear motive.”
After a moment Graves said, “Low cotton.”
“Huh?”
“You’re living large, they say you’re in high cotton. With this, we ain’t living large.”
He’d given up wondering where Graves came up with this shit, or why he kept saying it. Maybe he had a book of cool expressions, picked out a new one every day before he came in to work. Sayles didn’t know, didn’t want to know. This wasn’t a buddy film, guys knocking off a criminal or two in spectacular fashion then heading back to the house to have dinner together where the wife couldn’t cook and the kids were rude and cool in equal measure. One thing he hated, it was people dragging their lives behind them into the squad. That was one thing. Things he hated, it was getting to be a long list.
Josie was still in bed that morning when he left. She’d been in bed the night before when he came home, too. He’d gone into her room with some unbuttered toast, a cup of warm soup, pausing at the door before he went in, out of respect for her privacy. God knows when she’d last eaten.
He sat on the edge of the bed and put a hand on her shoulder. She was burrowed in pretty well. He could see that the pillow was damp with sweat. Across the room, on the TV always left on and at low volume, three white-toothed women exchanged stories about the funny things their husbands did.
“How’s my girl?”
She grunted. “That smells good.”
“I’ll leave it here on the table.” He knew it didn’t smell good to her, she was just trying to be nice. “Anything else I can get you?”
He waited, and after a minute he said, “Josie, you have to …”
She came out from under the covers. She didn’t say anything, but she smiled at him, and he felt his heart jump in his chest the way it had when he first met her, the way it had every day for thirty-six years.
“I’m going in to work. Call me later?”
She wouldn’t, and he didn’t want to call her, afraid he’d disturb the ragged minutes of sleep she managed to grasp, but just saying it made him feel better.
“You’re running late,” she said, though there’d been no clock in the bedroom for months.
He leaned over and kissed her forehead, catching the smell of her as he did, a mingle of cleansers, mouthwash, alcohol, sweat. Something acrid, sharp beneath. Josie under there somewhere too. He pulled out the trash-can liner, put another in, said good-bye. In the kitchen he tied off the liner and dropped it in the can under the sink.
Standing there looking out, he had drunk the rest of last night’s coffee, warmed up in the microwave, now cold again. He thought about his mother, how he hadn’t realized anything was wrong until he was a teenager, that other moms didn’t go weeks without bathing or refuse to throw away food so that it grew mold in the refrigerator or reuse table napkins. When he was young she always sent him off to school in white clothes. Helped make him tough, he now thought. Third grade, he’d picked up a trash can and slammed it on the head of the class bully for calling him Sailor. After that, he got to like the name. Sailors kept on the move, touched down lightly. Sometimes he still thought of himself as Sailor.
He glanced at the clock. Almost an hour late. He could feel time, every minute ticking past, all the years, crowding against him there at the window, feel the pressure of them in his chest, the weight of them in his bones.
Rankin had been cranked up in bed almost to a sitting position when they entered, looking up with a child’s face at the neurologist blathering on about synapses and neural rerouting. Judging by his eyes, the explanations Rankin needed right now were a lot simpler.
The neurologist finished his monologue and, without saying anything more, face as featureless as Rankin’s own, turned to leave. The nurse, Miss Brunner, excused herself and followed.
He and Graves glanced at one another to see who’d lead. He stepped up close to the bed, said who they were, held out his shield. Rankin’s face made all the appropriate motions, eye contact, down to the shield, back up, but Sayles didn’t know how much was getting through. Rankin didn’t look much different from when the neurologist was talking. He looked like soldiers did back in country, registering everything, none of it finding or falling into place.
“We have some questions, Mr. Rankin.”
“So do I.”
“We’ll tell you what we know.”
“Not for you. The questions, I mean.”
“All right. Then why don’t we start here: How much do you remember?”
Rankin shook his head without looking away.
“You know you were shot?”
“They told me. I was at work. Yesterday?”
“Three days ago. Today’s Friday. You don’t remember?”
He looked away a minute, at the window. Sayles wondered why they always do that.
“I remember there were all these faces above me. It was bright, I couldn’t see well. And I kept hearing thumps. People talking. My stomach and legs felt warm—like when you pee yourself?”
“Before that,” Graves said. “Do you remember anything before that?”
“No, that’s about it. I … Wait. I was drinking coffee, I think. Taking a break.”
“Where was this?” Sayles asked.
“In the break room.”
“Second floor, right? Same as your offices?”
“Right. At the end of the hall.”
“Which would put it by the stairwell.”
Rankin nodded.
“Was anyone else there?” Graves said.
“Maybe … Billy. Billy came in, to empty the trash.”
“No one else?”
They waited as he shook his head, thought, shook his head again. Nurse Brunner looked in. Sayles smiled at her.
“And you didn’t notice, don’t remember,” he said to Rankin, “anything out of the ordinary?”
“Like?”
“Anything. Doors left open that are usually shut, a change in someone’s routine.”
It’s all about patterns, Sayles thought. You map out the patterns, look for the disturbance in them, the one thing that’s not quite right.
“I’m sorry.”
“Thank you, Mr. Rankin,” Graves said. “We’ll need to come back again later, talk some more.”
Sayles held out his hand and waited. They shook. “I’ll leave a card here on the mirror above the sink,” he told Rankin. “Anything comes back to you, day or night, call me.”
They shared the elevator with an attendant pushing a man in a wheelchair. IVs of fluorescent-looking yellow fluid hung from poles; a bag almost filled with rust-colored urine swung beneath the seat. As they walked outside, Graves asked, “Where are you?”
He was thinking, of course.
“Of course.” Graves looked off. Under a nearby Chinese elm two grackles, feathers shining black in sunlight, were making enough noise for a dozen. “You love this job, don’t you, Sayles.”
Sayles shrugged.
“Most don’t. That surprise you?”
“Not really.” Very little surprised him, when you came right down to it.
They got to the car, a Chrysler only a year old and already beat to hell by a hundred wayward drivers. The patrol cars got checked shift to shift and taken care of; pool cars, no one much cared.
“Summer I was sixteen, desperate for money,” Sayles said, “I got a job at the slab fields down by the river. Lied about my age, but they didn’t care. Not much around in the way of work, it was either that or selling stuff no one wanted in run-down stores. And it paid well. So there I was, hundred-degree heat, bent double most of the day, hauling around crap that weighed as much as I did. Sun slammed down like a wall falling on you over and over, river stank of something huge and ancient and dead a long time.”
Sayles fired the car up.
“Now
that’s
work to hate.”
Under the tree, the grackles making so much noise had been joined by another. Wings spread wide, feathers blown out, two of them were jointly attacking the third.
“Copy,” Graves said.
