Lie Still (48 page)

I reached for the door latch. I opened the door. I swung my legs around. I slowly rose from my Datsun.

“Walk away ten steps and stop,” she ordered.

I walked ten steps and stopped. I put my hands in my pockets. I turned to watch her.

She slowly and deliberately backed out of the passenger’s side, keeping her pistol trained on the center of my vital organs. She walked cautiously toward me.

I waited.

She stopped five feet from me and laid a key on the gravel, then backed away.

I waited.

She said, “Pick it up. Slowly.”

I stepped to the key, bent over, pinched it between my right thumb and forefinger, and slowly straightened up, holding the key before me as if it might explode. It glinted in the moonlight.

I slowly put my hand back in my pocket. I waited.

She said, “Go inside.”

I turned around to face the door. I did not step forward.

I was wondering if my bowels or bladder would give out. Or if my heart would race away until I coded and dropped.

I heard slow crunching footsteps on the gravel behind me, drawing closer.

I didn’t move, though it was as much from fear as any plan of action.

The footsteps ceased. Very close.

I felt a blunt prod in my mid-back.

I involuntarily arched away, stiffening.

The prod hit a second time.

I did not wait for a third. I slid my hands out of my pockets as fast as I could make my muscles obey and spun 180

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degrees to my right, leading with my right elbow stuck out as a rotating hammer.

Her eyes saw. Her ears heard.

My flying right elbow hit her hand and the gun.

Her brain began to process. Mimi’s motor cortex sent electrochemical neural waves to her arm and wrist and hand, ordering them to contract the muscles to pull the trigger.

Simultaneously with my spin I brought the syringe in my left hand around and sideways as a dagger to Miriam Lyle’s right thigh muscles. The needle easily passed between cotton threads, through Mimi’s denim pants, and penetrated skin.

Nerves are slow. Mimi’s arm was wheeling sideways as the electrochemical waves made their way.

I squeezed on the syringe as the muscles in Mimi’s forearm began shortening, pulling on the tendon to her hand, both squeezing the trigger and tightening her grip in anticipation of the explosion.

At the first penetration of her thigh skin, a few tiny subcellular structures, built to detect noxious events at the surface of the skin, sent electrochemical neural waves up their parent dendrites.

The gun went off.

When the neural waves were processed by the attached clump of nerve cells in her spinal cord, signals were sent within a tenth of a second to all the muscles of the lower spine, the hips and the legs, all the muscles needed to simultaneously pull back the offended leg and shift weight to the other, all without her brain’s involvement. A simple protective animal reflex.

In the fraction of a second it took for the waves to pass up the nerves and the signals to be interpreted and the impulses sent to their muscles, my fingers emptied the syringe, most of it entering her quadriceps before her thigh jerked backwards.

The bullet flew up the canyon into the darkness.

The succinylcholine solution entered Mimi’s quadriceps muscle, forming a tiny liquid pocket.

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Wind resistance marginally slowed the bullet in its hori-zontal vector but gravity completely stopped it in its rising vector.

The liquid bubble in Mimi’s muscle immediately began diffusing into the fluid spaces between muscle fibers.

The bullet accelerated back toward the ground.

The succinylcholine began moving from the interfiber space to her bloodstream.

Simultaneously with my left-handed stab I lunged for her gun with my right hand. The momentum I had imparted to her arm by hammering it away from my back kept it swinging in a circle, as if in a physics experiment, teasingly just out of my reach.

Mimi staggered backwards away from me, windmilled her arms, and regained her footing. She swung her gun back into the space between us and glared and seethed like a newly piqued bull in a Mexican ring.

The bullet found earth, probably striking a cottonwood tree or a rock or a coyote three or four miles away.

She would have killed me instantly had not her predica-ment flitted across her mind. She gulped and stared down the gunsight.

“Sux,” I said.

I waited.

I held the syringe up to the moonlight. “I’d say you got at least half a gram.”

She was audibly hyperventilating.

“You could kill me,” I said. “It would be the last thing you ever did.”

She raised the gun high and straight at my face and glowered and thought and pumped breath in and out of her lungs.

The black pistol began to drift earthward.

“Malcolm,” she said. “S-save m-m-m . . .”

Her hand opened like a flower in a time-lapse documen-tary. The gun dropped onto the sand.

She staggered again. She fell backwards onto her buttocks. She looked comical.

Her arms and legs were twitching. It looked like the mus-LIE STILL

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cles of her face were trying to dance off the bones, but her head turned and her face was in shadow in the shimmering half-light.

She fell over on her side and lay still.

I said, “You just quit breathing.”

I stepped over to her and stood over her. I rubbed my face.

I said, “You were going to kill me. You killed Henry. You were going to kill me.”

I picked up the gun. I pointed it at Mimi. “The dead body.

Killed in self-defense.” My breath was seething. “So romantic.”

I swung the gun straight up over our heads and fired. The slapping report echoed a half second later. I could see her immobile eyes staring up at me, open, reflecting the moon.

I fired again and again and again, empty casings raining on us both, crackling reports and muffled echoes flying out and back from all directions like so many bats, until the gun stopped responding to my finger on the trigger. The bullets flew over steep arcs, up and down, probably hitting only rocks or trees or coyotes on the canyon rim behind the house. I pulled the gun down and looked at it as if I’d never seen one before. The action had locked, open, hungry for more bullets. I pitched the pistol toward the cottonwoods.

I said, “You killed Henry. You can die, too. Your body, here, this—the gun, the casings—the evidence. The truth may come out yet.”

I stepped over her to my car and got in. The keys were dangling in the ignition.

I closed my eyes, then opened them. I turned the key and the car fired up. I was going to get the sheriff.

I revved the engine to its loudest roar, then let it die down, then revved it again and again.

I shut off the car.

I went back to Mimi. I said, “I know you can hear me.”

I bent and straightened her out into the position of a patient. Her eyes were wide open. “You can see me, too.” I pushed shut each eyelid in turn. “Your corneas will dry out.”

The eyelids fell open again.

I was shivering.

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I said, “Two minutes. It’s been two minutes. They say it takes four minutes for the big pyramid cells at the top of your brain to start to die off. They need a lot of oxygen.”

I knelt at her side.

“But those are the cells that count.”

I tilted her head back a bit, as if to do rescue breathing.

I said, “But I don’t need to tell you that. Should I breathe for you? Should I save your life?”

I squeezed her nose shut with my left hand, pressed my mouth fully around hers and blew my used breath into her lungs.

I said, “Should I tease you? One breath every minute or so? Drag out your unconsciousness. A prolonged death.

Like Henry.”

I gave her another breath. “Too cruel?”

I gave her another breath. “Are you listening? I think I’ll tell you all about Henry. His pain.”

I gave her another breath. “I bet Henry felt like you do right now.”

Her eyes were startlingly bright pools of reflected moonlight, but quiet and lifeless as a rain puddle after a storm.

I gave Mimi two more breaths. I laid two fingers on her throat. Her pulse was over 160. “I wonder if desperate breathlessness will be an epiphany for you.”

I picked up the pace of the breathing. “I wonder if Henry even knew he was dying. He was so used to breathlessness.

Maybe it didn’t bother him as much.”

Three more breaths. “Of course then his heart went shitty.

He surely was unconscious by then.”

A breath. “Did you know this is the morning? The apnea challenge. All the bedside tests.”

A breath. “His EEG is bad, but not brain-dead.”

A breath. “His cortex has already started to atrophy.”

A breath. “If he can make a breathing motion he will go to a home for the not-quite-dead.”

A breath. “Purgatory on earth.”

A breath. “His mother wants him back the way he was.”

A breath. “Like
that
is still on the list.”

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A breath. “His stepfather wants a big lawsuit so he can feel important.”

A breath. “His lawyer wants forty percent of the settlement.”

A breath. “That, no doubt, will happen.”

A breath. “His priest wants Jesus to come down off the cross and make a call.”

A breath. “That, no doubt, will not happen.”

A breath. “His brothers and sisters want their mommy back.”

I stopped talking. I stared up at the night sky. The white of the moon looked like quicksilver on fire, though its canyons and craters stoically refused to melt. The stars to be seen above the other wall were few because of the aura of King Moon, but the stalwarts present seemed to crackle, not twinkle.

I said, “They want their mommy back,” then did only rescue breathing. The physical work involved began to warm me up. My adrenal glands backed down off their own red-line output. I quit shivering. Mimi’s pulse came down to around 125, then 100. I had apparently gotten her carbon dioxide level below the panic line.

“My knees are killing me,” I told her. I gave two quick breaths and dragged her off the gravel path into the sand and feathery grasses.

There I continued breathing another twenty minutes. I had nothing else to say. To her. Henry—Henry I needed to talk to.

Mimi’s eyelids twitched. She blinked. I gave another breath. Her belly twitched as if she had hiccups. “You’re recovering,” I said. I gave more breaths. She began spastic intermittent jerks of her arms and legs, faint and weak at first but quickly building to a comic fugue. As I bent to her to give another breath I felt her exhale against my cheek. She had pulled a breath on her own.

I waited. I watched her face. She inhaled, exhaled. It was shallow but real. Her mouth was moving. She inhaled again.

I stood and stretched.

I rubbed my knees.

I got into my car and drove away.

24

H E N RY RO J E L I O , DAY S E V E N

My descent to Phoenix was semiconscious; staring; blinking at the few oncoming headlights. I replayed my fight with Mimi as if it were a continuous loop, endlessly repeating itself, never changing. I was intellectually certain of every detail and nuance but never viscerally convinced it had really happened, that it had not all been another bad dream.

The driving time let me face the vision of Henry and his family I had acquired while speaking my broken monologue to Mimi. Henry was the primary unfortunate in our Passion Play. Had I gone straight to the detectives, Mimi Lyle might have been apprehended, evidence intact, but more important to me was the chance to make a partial fix.

I drove to Maricopa and pulled my car into the exact parking spot I had left only hours earlier.

5:02 A.M. Henry, Day 7. I knew the med students and interns would start showing up at bedsides in an hour or so, silently and sleepily blinking through charts and flow sheets, cribbing notes on file cards, hoping to have at hand whatever minutiae their attendings might ask for. I would easily move beneath notice in such a crowd of zombies.

I was surprisingly unafraid, and not the slightest bit un-LIE STILL

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certain. But I envisioned my hands or my lips trembling. Responding to the epinephrine pouring from my adrenals and giving me up as a man with something to hide. The body’s epinephrine system is not tuned for deceptions.

Politicians, I had read, sometimes used Inderal to slow their systems down before public appearances; Richard Nixon used it to stop his upper lip from sweating.

I had a little time to kill; why not get some along with my other necessaries? I figured I needed ten or twenty milligrams. I slouched toward the ER.

At the edge of the mercury vapor light pool provided for ambulance crews, I nonchalantly checked my pocket. I still had the second gram of sux.

Were it a Saturday night I could count on a carnival quality in the Maricopa ER—clowns and hawkers and lost children all milling about in search of something intangible. But even on those besotted nights, by 3:00 or 4:00 A.M. of the Sunday morning, after the bars have closed and the drunks have finished driving into trees and shooting, stabbing, and beating on each other, it is often eerily quiet. On this boring workday at 5:00 A.M. then, it might be altogether empty and not a good time for minor larceny.

The code on the digital keypad controlling the “Staff Only”

door to the Emergency Department was easy to remember—

9-1-1-9-1-1. The heavy steel door opened itself with a lethargic electric whir. I mumbled, “Alacazam.” Instead of a hoard of gold and jewels I was instantly slapped in the face by the escaping stench of vomitus. A Hispanic voice shouted, “Careful, Doc!” The floor in front of me was a lake of stomach contents. An arm of the lake trailed into the exam room just off to the right. A pillar of the Maricopa wee hours, Teresita, a 250-pound ER aide, was chugging toward me with a mop and bucket at her usual frenetic pace. Someone retched long and hard in the exam room, then began a muffled sob.