The Killer Is Dying
Contents
To Karyn,
for just about everything
HE IS AWAKE AGAIN, with no idea what time it may be, or whether, really, he has slept at all. He sleeps poorly these days. Strange, too, how time’s become a blur. At first there’s no reason to know the time of day, then days themselves give way, finally years. Till only the change of seasons marks another passage, another decline. To remember, he has to think back to where he lived, what rented room or cheap apartment in Gary, Gretna, Memphis, Seattle.
There are no streetlights in this part of the city. These are reserved for kinder, gentler regions to the north and east. Here, it is about as dark as dark gets. Light from the billboard across the street, its legend in Spanish and advertising the latest luxury vehicle, enters the room at a slant. It does little more, he thinks, than blur the darkness.
Periodically he lifts one hand, the left, into that light, closes his fingers to a fist and opens them again, watching the play of muscle, tendons, and scars. As the hand opens, it begins to shake. That’s the drugs. The drugs make him shake. But without the drugs he shakes more. The drugs make him stupid, too—and he can’t afford to be stupid.
He hears two people shouting at one another outside, on the balcony the next floor up, from the sound of it.
“It’s my fucking money!”
“And it’s
my
fucking car!”
Then the rimshot of someone getting slammed against a wall or door.
A radio or TV in the next room drones on as it has for the four days he has been here. It’s tuned to talk shows, words indistinguishable, only the cadence and inflection changing with hosts, callers or guests, commercial announcements. From time to time another voice, that of the room’s occupant, joins in, as though in conversation.
He gets up and, feet swollen, pads to the bathroom. A cockroach that had been drinking from the bowl flows up the side of the sink and vanishes over the edge when the light goes on. With a razorblade he splits one of the pills in half. They stop the shaking, for a time. An hour, two. And while they don’t help the pain, they do cause the world to go soft in interesting ways. Walls curve outward, corners and angles retreat, everything slows. As though transparent panes have gone up between himself and all else.
While there he fills and drinks from the glass that, hating the smell and taste of plastic, he carries with him from place to place. The pills leave him permanently cotton-mouthed.
In T-shirt and boxers, he steps out onto the walkway. The clamor from the balcony above has subsided. He realizes that he had almost forgotten where he is, but now the far-off lights, low buildings, and sprawl of dark sky remind him. Out on the street, past the cracked black asphalt of a parking lot that looks like lava flow, a lowrider cruises by at fifteen miles an hour. It’s a Ford Galaxie from the fifties, tricked out with spinners for caps and painted all over with bright-colored dragons and iridescent, half-naked women. In the distance he hears what have to be gunshots from a large-bore handgun. The shots are clean, distinct, clearly separated. From that direction, within moments, a siren cries, then abruptly cuts off.
There is another sound, though. In the eaves of this low-end, by-the-week motel, in an angled joist just beneath the lip, a pigeon has built its nest, from which one of the nestlings has fallen. Frantic and helpless, the parent looks down, twisting its head and blinking, as the chick tries to get to its feet, flutters stubby wings, and chirps so softly it is barely audible.
He stands watching a long while before he turns and goes inside.
Someone in the next room, or someone on the radio, someone on TV, is weeping.
IT’S HIS THIRD DAY HERE, and he sees in the waitress’s eyes that she remembers him. For what he is about, this is the best location, but now he’ll have to change.
The man he is watching always arrives within five minutes either side of nine. He parks his year-old Hyundai by one of the skimpy palo verde trees at the rear of the lot. Lunch, he takes at the restaurant half a block away,
Home Cooking
and
Daily Specials
painted in block yellow letters on the front window. Periodically his head and shoulders may be seen in one of the second-story windows. He is among neither the first nor the last to leave.
How this man could possibly be of such concern as to bring someone to engage his services, Christian can’t imagine—a nondescript office-dweller at a nondescript accounting firm in a featureless city where everything is dun-colored.
None of that is any concern of his. Interesting, though, that he thinks it.
The client has asked that it be clean, without the possibility of connection, clue, or trace, no indication of professional work, nothing to suggest that it might be anything other than one of the random deaths occurring hourly in cities: drug deals or muggings gone sour, ramped-up lover’s quarrels, gang initiations, drive-bys.
Two tables over, a couple is having what his girlfriend back in college called The Talk. Their voices are quiet, their physical interchanges limited to gestures, eyes, and a gamelike shuffling of objects (spoons, glass bin of sweetener, water glass, coffee cups) on the tabletop, but the substance of their discourse is identical to that on the balcony last evening.
Every human interaction, even the most unremarkable, is an economic exchange, he thinks: each side wants something. And it still amazes him how much anger is in people. You see it always in their eyes, in the pitch of voices kept low, in the way they pass through doors or down hallways. So many of them are like jars, forever filling.
He finishes his coffee, toast, and oatmeal and leaves a small tip, pays at the register where the cashier and the other waitress are talking about “classic” TV shows.
On the street a well-appointed homeless man starts toward him, then, with a closer look at his face, something seen there, turns away. Christian steps after him, reaching for his wallet even as he does, but thinks better of it. Too much already, that the waitress remembers him.
There is a small park up the street, just a clump of trees and a bench at street’s edge, really, but somehow in this strange place it’s even earned a name, Willamette Park, and for two days he’s passed an hour or so there following breakfast. He is of an age that no one thinks it amiss for him to be dawdling unoccupied at nine in the morning; with his open-necked shirt, loose khaki pants, and polyester sports jacket, he could easily be a retiree from any of the dozen apartment complexes set in the interlocking streets back off the thoroughfare here. He has not read a newspaper in years, but carries one.
There are pigeon droppings like tides of dried chalk on the bench, so he removes a section from the paper and sits on that. It’s because they have no sphincters, he thinks. Birds have no sphincters, giraffes have no voice, dogs see only black and white. So little difference, finally, between an adaptive characteristic and a liability. We all make do. We find ways around.
He cannot see as well from here, but the building with the man he is watching, the building with the name
Brell
set into a fan of bricks above the entryway, remains in his line of sight.
He remembers one of his favorites, the show about cephalopods. Fish were disappearing from tanks in a marine lab. They couldn’t figure out what was going on, all these brilliant scientists. The lab was locked, and no one came in at night. The tanks were covered save for a narrow space at the top. Finally they set up cameras, caught it on film. Each night the octopus had been heaving itself out of its tank, crossing dry countertop, and pushing its body through the impossibly narrow opening to treat itself to a midnight buffet from a neighboring tank.
A bus comes by, one of those segmented doubles that looks like a worm. Space for, what, a hundred people within? With maybe a dozen heads afloat in the windows. Its sides bear banner ads for action movies and portraits of local newscasters with too many teeth. He watches the bus work its cautious way around a corner.
Just off the thoroughfare, on one of the narrow, short streets, a car has been parked since he first arrived. Late-model Buick, blue-gray, no parking decals or other stickers, with a single man inside. Lots of dust, but that doesn’t take long in this dry, brown place, and the vehicle is otherwise clean. Front plates are not required here, and the vehicle faces out. Though he can’t see clearly at this remove, Christian suspects the man is elderly. Light, perhaps silvery hair tops the newspaper he is reading, its color looking close to that of the smoke from his cigars. Likely he’s from one of the apartments, out to get away from his wife, or from the family he lives with, from their interdiction of his smoking.
After an hour, Christian has to relieve himself. Two office buildings nearby have bathrooms on the ground floor. He alternates using them.
All these movies and TV shows with stakeouts, you never hear how the guy has to pee in a Coke bottle. He’d done the Texas catheter thing a couple of times in the past—condom, tube, can—but only under duress. Plan well, stay loose, you don’t often have to resort to such. Soon enough, anyway, for catheters and their like. Not a chance he’d wait around for that. His old man went that way.
Beautiful young women in business clothes sit on the low wall outside the building smoking, and in the lobby a guard patiently explains why a man in a threadbare black suit and pink flip-flops cannot pass out religious brochures here.
Instinctively the watcher lowers his head as he passes beneath the security camera in the corridor leading down to the restrooms. He checks the other booths, enters one near the door, and sits listening to the sounds around him, some from far away, others close by. Thud and shudder of steel doors closing, clang of feet on mesh-metal stairs, voices stripped of mid-range by high ceilings and hallways. All the breaths going in and out, hundreds of them in dozens upon dozens of rooms, and beneath that, the building’s own breath as it pushes through miles of ever smaller ducts.
He looks down at the hand trembling on his bare thigh. He has to pee all the time now. The pills constipate him, despite his tossing back what seems like a gallon of mineral oil a week, and he spends hours on the pot trying, but the pee—the pee never stops.
Toward the end, back when he still lived at home, his father, well along in years (fifty-plus when he was born), would spend afternoons stalking about the front yard, staring at what was left of the city’s curb, at remnants of paint on the side of the house, at abandoned bird’s nests and tree trunks. He had always believed the old man to be thinking. About how his life had gone, maybe, or the meaning of it all. Slowly he came to understand that the old man wasn’t thinking at all, he was searching—looking aimlessly about, with a dull but persistent hope, for something he’d never had.
Coming back up the street, Christian sees activity at the entrance to the Brell building. Three police cruisers and a fire truck sit flanking an ambulance with loading doors agape. As he looks on, attendants wheel out a gurney through the reef of onlookers, who part to make room. One of the attendants is Hispanic, with short, short legs and no hips, his upper body huge, rotund, as though the stuff of his body has been forced upward, year after year, by a belt cinched too tightly. The other, an older black man with a soul patch, woolly sideburns, and not much else by way of hair, holds aloft an IV bag. The attendants bend to release and tuck the gurney’s legs as the watcher steps closer.
On the gurney, bloody, patched and pasty white, but still alive, is the man he has been watching.
