Dead Anyway (2 page)

It was in this mode that I walked briskly in the clear, spring weather to the post office, where I kept a P.O. box. Much of my research involved correspondence not possible over the Internet, so the oft-derided snail mail system was for me a vital resource, one called upon almost daily. Not giving up my exact location was a soft security measure.

I wasn’t by nature very sentimental. If my neighborhood post office was useless to me, I’d never have walked into the place again, with no regrets. Which would have been a shame, because I liked it there. It was an antique operation, thus far eluding modernization. The postal workers were all much older than me. There was stained oak woodwork and uniformed people sitting behind arched windows. The floors were marble and the stamp machines solid brass. The posters and official notices stuck to bulletin boards were the only evidence you hadn’t flashed back in time. That and the aggressive impatience of the clientele winding their way down a gauntlet of red velvet rope.

When I got to the window I presented my P.O. number and driver’s license. The woman disappeared for a few minutes, then returned with a stack of mail and overstuffed nine by twelve envelopes.

Included in the mail was a check from one of my favorite clients, climatologists for whom I’d been running regression analyses. They had contracts from academia, government and industry, the perfect trifecta, resulting entirely from their ruthless objectivity. Their job was to predict the weather. Not tomorrow’s rainy day, but what the mean temperature and sea level might be five years from now. These guys didn’t just cleave to the data, they were the data. Pure play empiricists. I didn’t pray at the same altar as they did, but I knew the liturgy.

That’s why they needed me. The regression equations they’d designed couldn’t be controlled by mathematical formulas alone. They needed a little finesse—a tweak or two here and there to stabilize the results and keep the models in reasonable balance. And then, an explanation of what it all meant that anyone, scientist or CFO alike, could understand. They never told me I was meeting their objectives—I never heard a single spoken word from any of them—but they continued to send bundles of DVD’s filled with variables and parameters, always paid their bills in less than ten days and never asked me to redo the work.

When I first got the gig, they gave me an application that essentially turned my PC into a smart terminal connected through the web to their massively parallel processing arrays. That was another reason I liked the assignment—the chance to mess around with staggering computational power from the comfort of my home office.

On the way back to the house, I countered some of the wholesome effects of the walk by getting a double scoop chocolate ice cream cone. I was on a first name basis with the head scooper of the place, illustrating yet another of my self-gratifying routines.

Though not without a penalty. I leavened the worst of my fleshy face with a huge Elliot Gould moustache started in college and never shaved off. This was the only feature that ever sparked admiration from the opposite sex, in particular Florencia, which explained why I never shaved it off.

Most foods were easy to work around, but ice cream cones, not so easy.

W
HEN
I got home, I was surprised and pleased to see Florencia’s car in the driveway. Along with an SUV, dark maroon with a trailer hitch, roof rack and decal on the left rear side window granting parking privileges at a local university.

I called to her when I went into the house. She called back from the living room. The sun was still high in the sky, but that part of the house was amply shaded by a pair of sugar maples, so when I walked into the living room I didn’t see her right away. In her black pencil skirt and blue blouse, she almost disappeared against the dark leather couch. She sat stiffly upright, knees held tightly together and hands shoved under her thighs. She stared at me, not answering when I greeted her.

“Sit down,” said a voice from behind me.

I spun around and saw a man sitting in a small side chair. He wore an almost comically oversized trench coat, with a belt and raglan shoulders, a black baseball cap and sunglasses.

His legs were crossed and he held in gloved hands a gun with a long silencer.

My mind sizzled with alarm and my heart shot into my throat, making it hard to speak.

“Who are you?” I managed to choke out.

“Sit down,” he said again, and stood up, waving me toward the couch. I did as he asked and Florencia grabbed my hand in hers, which was cold and wet.

My heart was spinning hard in my chest and I took deep slow breaths to try to bring it under control.

The man took the stuffed chair across from us and put the gun back in his lap. He looked about ten years older than me, somewhere in his early fifties, based on the grey hair sticking out of his baseball cap and the condition of his skin. His nose was long and thin, his lips red. Like me, he had jowls, though his hung more loosely from an ill-defined chin. I didn’t know the color of his eyes. They were hidden behind the sunglasses.

“Nice house,” said the man, looking around. “You do your own decorating?”

I didn’t see Florencia nod, so fixed was I on the man’s gun, but she must have, because the man nodded back.

“I admire that,” he said. “My wife is always after me to hire a decorator, when I keep telling her, you’re very artistic. What need do you have for such expensive ridiculousness? I think it’s all the TV shows, with these fags coming in and turning some shithole into, what, a room at the Waldorf? All bullshit, of course, but it gets the women all worked up.”

“What do you want?” I asked

“Nothing. I’m all set. Had my last cup of coffee of the day before meeting up with your lovely wife.”

“I mean, what do you want. Why are you here?” I said.

He looked down at his gun, as if surprised to see it in his hand.

“Oh, you mean, like, why am I sitting in your living room with this gun? Why indeed.”

“He told me you’d be killed if I didn’t come with him to the house,” said Florencia. “I only know him as an appointment. A life prospect.”

“A life prospect,” said the man. “There’s your irony for you.”

Florencia’s hand tightened on mine. I wondered if I could move fast enough to grab the gun before he could shoot me. Not only if I was fast enough, but if I had the strength to overcome him. The baggy overcoat hid his physique, which could have been far more formidable than mine.

As if to settle the question, he picked the gun off his lap and pointed it at my chest.

“I’m here to perform a simple transaction. You’re both professional people. You know transactions are best made efficiently with a minimum of back and forth.”

He reached into an inside pocket of his overcoat and pulled out an envelope.

“Actually, in this case, I simply give you this piece of paper.” He handed the envelope and a pen to Florencia, who picked the items gingerly out of his hand with her long, elegant fingers. “You read it and fill in the blanks. Or I shoot you. I already know one of the answers, so if you like risking your life on one in five odds, go for it.”

“What is it?” I asked.

He shook his head.

“That’s only for your wife to know,” he said. He looked at Florencia. “You tell him and I shoot him in the balls.” He lowered the gun to underscore the point.

The flap of the envelope was unsealed. Florencia pulled out and unfolded a sheet of paper and started reading. I wanted to look down, but I’d already been warned. I didn’t know enough to test the boundaries.

After a sharp intake of breath, Florencia asked, “And if I don’t?”

“The usual,” he said, then reached the gun across the divide between us and flicked the muzzle across her right breast. “Maybe after you and me have some fun and games. You like fun, don’t you gorgeous?”

I wondered again about the probability of reaching him from a sitting position, wrestling away the gun, and holding him powerless until the police arrived. I must have telepathically communicated this, because the man reacted by shooting a hole in my left thigh.

“Jesus Christ, Forgiver of Sins,” he said to Florencia, “do I have to wait all day for you to fill out that motherfucking thing?”

A second after hearing him say this I was consumed by monstrous pain. I yelled and cried, and wept with fear and agony. I clutched at the wound and watched blood rush out between my fingers. Florencia’s hand clutched alongside mine, until the man tapped her in the face with the muzzle of the gun and told her to sit back in the sofa.

“Do it or I put a few more holes in the dumb fuck,” said the man.

“He’s not dumb. He’s brilliant,” said Florencia. “You just don’t know that, you stupid bastard.” Her hand holding the pen raced across the paper, which I tried to read with no success.

Florencia handed it back along with the envelope. The man folded the sheet along the creases and put it back in the envelope, which he stuck in his inside coat pocket. I saw all this through a liquid veil, my eyes gushing tears, my brain barely able to comprehend what was happening.

The man sat back in the chair, making himself comfortable.

“We need to call him an ambulance,” said Florencia, in a calm, measured voice. “I did what you asked me to do.”

“You did,” said the man. “I gotta give you that.”

Then he shot her in the forehead.

I felt the spray of blood and brains splash across my face. I yelled, I think, though I don’t remember for sure.

“No hard feelings,” said the man. “That ‘stupid bastard’ thing aside.”

Then he shot me in the head, too.

C
HAPTER
2

B
eing indifferent to life gives you a fresh perspective. I didn’t mind that I faded in and out of reality. In fact, I welcomed the lush euphoria of semi-consciousness, where I could note the staggering destruction that had been done to me without feeling its effects. My sister later explained that this was the morphine talking, which she administered cautiously, negotiating that devil’s deal—irrational bliss versus possible addiction, detachment versus horrible pain and crushing grief.

Consciousness, however incomplete, came to me after I was moved to her house, so there was no recollection of the hospital, the operations or the coma I fell in and out of for months, both natural and artificially-induced to prevent the swelling in my brain from killing me before the neurosurgeons had a chance to repair the damage. As best they could.

I remember someone telling me, soon after I became aware again of my own existence, that I was lucky to be alive. That was the most debatable statement of the century.

It wasn’t my sister Evelyn who said it, though she could have. She was a doctor, and also Florencia’s best friend. Her first statement to me, sadly repeated a few times until it stuck in my memory, was that Florencia had been killed instantly. I would have been killed, too, but for a lucky (that word again) turn the bullet took when it struck the right side of my skull, mostly bypassing the frontal lobe, then cutting a shallow tunnel through the parietal and exiting the back of my head.

The two holes in my head were very tidy, indicating a small bore round, like a .22, with a heavy charge. There were any number of other combinations of bullets, powder and weaponry that would have had a much more catastrophic effect. Which meant I was only near death for part of a year and not completely dead like I should have been.

We’d been found by a neighbor, whose cat I was feeding while she and her husband were on vacation. She saw our cars in the driveway, and when we didn’t answer the doorbell, she walked around to the patio at the back of the house. She looked through a pair of French doors and could see the tops of our heads over the sofa, and when we didn’t answer her knocking, she called the cops, who got there before I’d completely bled out. Another bit of dubious luck.

I
LEARNED
this in fragments as my consciousness, hearing and limited motor skills slowly returned.

Apparently my eyes opened before I could process what I saw, triggering an hysterical response from the nurse on duty. In no time the room was filled with anxious, inquiring faces, gentle prods and sheets of paper with hand-lettered messages. None of it made any sense, and finally weary of it all, I closed my eyes again and puzzled over the groans of disappointment.

Sometime after that a version of my sight returned, enough to make eye contact and respond to signals. I know now that this was an important step, but at the time I was merely annoyed at all the ridiculous celebration.

T
HE LAST
thing to come back was my voice. And the first words I croaked out were, “Did they catch the guy?”

“Another country heard from,” said Evelyn, sitting at my bedside. “They don’t tell me much, but I’d know if they had.”

“Any idea why?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I was going to ask you the same thing.”

“I need to talk to the police,” I said. “I can identify the killer.”

“I told them, and everyone else, that you were in a persistent vegetative state, and would likely stay there forever. That’s the story that ran in the newspapers. The only people who know it isn’t true are Dr. Selmer, the neurologist, and Joan Bendleson, the visiting nurse who was here when you opened your eyes.”

“Why the deception?” I asked.

“You said it yourself. You can identify the killer.”

I tried to ask her more questions, but had trouble getting the words out. She patted my arm, and held her mildly sympathetic expression, using all her meager bedside skills to mask her deeper feelings. She told me the aphasia was obviously clearing, but I shouldn’t tax my voice box. She said to let it rest for another day, and we’d try to catch up again. She had to go back to the hospital, but Joan would keep an eye on me, and then she left.

Two weeks later, my voice was still impaired, but my mind, nearly free of painkillers, approached the functional, or at least that’s what I thought at the time. As a researcher, I’d been trained to resist jumping to conclusions with insufficient data. Though I’d also learned that certain determinations could be made based on a small set of data points, assuming they were consistent and powerful. Powerful data is what I had, and some important decisions to make.