The Killer Is Dying (11 page)
FIRST THING HE HAD TO DO was get to an ATM, buy some decent clothes that fit and would allow him to blend in. Lucky his shoes had made it to the room with him, at least. None of his clothes had. He’d grabbed pants and a shirt from the room next to his, single bed with an old man who watched his every move and never made a sound. He’d already pulled back the inner soles of his shoes to check on the bank cards stashed there for emergencies. But this too-small polyester shirt and these orangish slacks with trampled cuffs wouldn’t do.
They’d rolled him up to a room, finally, stretcher piloted by a young Asian man who wheeled at what seemed double speed through halls and doorways, avoiding crash after crash by scant millimeters. Hot on their trail came Miss Feyn from Admissions. It was imperative that she get information. Each time she asked his name, Social Security number, home address, insurance carrier, he would begin to answer, then nod off. The drugs they’d given him, of course. She shuffled her papers and feet, looked out the window, and finally said, I’ll have to come back later.
Filling the space Miss Feyn left appeared a nurse who never gave her name, welcomed him to the unit, and explained that, if there was nothing he needed at the moment, they were getting ready for shift change and someone would be with him shortly to get him checked in and settled.
So he waited. Heard elevator doors open and close, loud greetings, laughter, banter. In a few minutes that subsided, and he knew they were in report, one or two left behind at the nurse’s station to keep watch, the rest in seclusion.
He rolled his legs over the side of the bed and sat for moments as the room stopped pitching and weaving, then experimentally stood. Not too unsteadily—and not bad, considering all that had gone down. Ripping off the tape, he pulled the IVs one by one, pushed and held his thumb against each site to minimize bleeding. His blood ran thin; minor cuts would bleed and bleed.
That done, he slipped on his shoes and went next door to borrow clothing from his neighbor.
As he walked past the nurse’s station, the woman sitting there looked up. He smiled, thanked her, and added that he’d be back for the next visiting hours.
The alarm hadn’t sounded when he went out the door, but the heat had slammed into him, left him shaken, breathless. He walked slowly, clamping down with his will, deep breath, hold, exhale, and soon enough was a fair imitation of normal. Four blocks along, he found a Circle K.
There were two ahead of him. An Hispanic man in his early twenties repeatedly reinserted his card as he leafed through the growing collection of transaction slips. An older woman, wearing what these days they called business casual, waited behind him; with each new try she rolled her eyes. When at last the young man gave up and her turn came, she counted her money, recounted it, placed the bills precisely in her pocketbook, filed away the transaction slip with what looked to be a year’s worth of them, then painstakingly fitted her bank card back into the foremost photo sleeve. At the counter she bought a bottled water and a lottery ticket.
Two hours later, scrubbed and still wet, with the air conditioner vent blowing up at him, he stood at the window of the Tropicana Motel, whose palm-tree sign, pool, and desk clerk had all seen better days, though probably not a hell of a lot better. The pool bore a layer of leaves and mostly dead insects that in fact looked much like the desk clerk’s skin. Foot-high weeds grew from cracks in the parking lot. Many of the doors he passed on the way to his room showed signs of having been in the past forcibly sprung.
In an adjoining room a TV played. There was something wrong with the TV, or with the reception, so that the sound was mostly static, but no one seemed to care. Maybe they’d gone out, or checked out, and left it on. But he’d heard the toilet flush over there a while back.
The bleeding had stopped, the dizziness hadn’t. And he didn’t have his pills. Everything else was replaceable. The pills weren’t. But then … maybe that was just as well. He held up his hand and willed the tremor to stop. It did—or he persuaded himself that it had. And why would it matter which was true?
No pills. What he
did
have was a drive he hadn’t known for a long time now, muscle, a purpose behind his actions: finding who had attacked John Rankin.
Why
he was doing it remained opaque, impenetrable. Not pride. Not honor. Certainly not a sense of justice. But there it was, the road before him. And finally the why didn’t matter any more than the truth of whether or not his tremors had actually stopped.
In early youth he’d read a lot of fiction. Novels like
Treasure Island
and the Tom Swift books, short stories published by the dozen in magazines back then,
Redbook
,
Argosy
,
Boy’s Life
. Over time it came to him that most fiction, maybe all of it, from the grandest tales to the most commonplace, was about things that were missing. Family, lovers, sustenance, peace, ideals. At the heart of all those stories were emptinesses, yearnings, hollows that couldn’t be filled—as though bereavement were hardwired into mankind.
And that was a thing he never felt, could not understand. Like music.
It was then he knew that he was different. Apart somehow, exempt. Not different in the way every adolescent feels, but substantially, deeply, definitively different, in ways that couldn’t be breached.
And now, comically, he seemed to have his answer to a question he had felt no need to ask. Finding his usurper, finding Rankin’s attacker. A passion, a purpose.
Back in Rankin’s hospital room he had stood, pretending to note something on his clipboard, something about the lines supplying medical gases, as he tracked approaching footsteps. Turned to confront a man in gray suit, blue shirt. A man with strong hands who seemed out of place, who didn’t quite fit. A cop or hospital official, he had thought at the time, though neither seemed likely.
Then, before he woke up in the hospital himself, the driver of a tan Honda with three dents in the front fender, cruising by Rankin’s house a second time. And the face turning toward him the same as the one back in Rankin’s hospital room.
He was sure of it.
That night in his sleep he took his place in a long line of people moving slowly forward, inch by inch, hundreds of them, people as far as he could see, people ahead of him, people behind. No one knew where they were going. No one left the line. They continued to move forward. Slowly. By inches. Beneath a sky neither dark nor light.
GRAVES ALWAYS THOUGHT of himself as a private man. Always tried to respect the privacy of others.
This thing with Sayles, though. With Josie, her there in the what-do-you-call-it, the hospice, and him not going to see her. Sitting out front of the place like some damn teenager or stalker. Hard not to say something.
He’d been thinking about it ever since Sayles dropped him off at his house.
He was sitting in his favorite spot, the glider on the back porch, looking out on oleanders that cut the yard off from all else, holding a beer that he kept forgetting to drink. The oleanders were tugging at the phone lines again. He’d have to take care of that soon. But he’d bought the house for the oleanders as much as for anything else. Walked right through the house onto the back porch and said he’d take it. Never had a house before. Even back when Jennie was around, they’d rented. They talked about freedom a lot back then.
Freedom.
Big words, big ideas. Fit okay when you were young. And it wasn’t that you outgrew them, it was just that after a while you started looking silly wearing them.
Back then, you’d have had a hard time picking anyone less likely to become a cop. He’d been in grad school, studying history. And Jennie was making perfumes, candles, what she called essences, selling them at art fairs and gift shops, then got into Internet sales early on. Jennie was rich now, living in Mexico, some kind of artist’s colony. He heard from her every month or so by e-mail.
Hell, even he had trouble reconstructing how it happened. They ran out of money, of course. So much for the MA. He taught as a sub, mostly elementary school, which he hated, then a procession of I’m-not-really-just-a-worker jobs: bookstore sales, editing a trade publication, project manager at a credit card company. Fielded calls at a suicide prevention center for a time. Ended up clerking in a law office where police frequently came to be deposed or coached prior to testimony. He’d talk to them on breaks, hang with them as they waited their turn.
Shazam.
Before he knows it he’s sitting in a patrol car that stinks of feet and fast food and gasoline fumes watching a kid that’s not more than twelve years old run out of a mom-and-pop store carrying a gun big as his head.
He understands his limits, never had pretentions to being a great cop. He does the job. He thinks and acts in straight lines. He’s smarter than most, and quick, so he did well as a line officer, moved up the line at a steady pace.
Years back, he’d taken one of those left brain/right brain tests. A woman in silhouette spinning endlessly. If you saw the spin as counterclockwise, it meant the left brain, the logical part, was dominant. Clockwise, the right brain, the creative side, was dominant. That woman had never spun other than counterclockwise for him, and never would.
Unlike Sayles, he’s predictable. Same procedures, same moves, again and again. No sudden connections, none of those damned patterns Sayles was always talking about, just A to B to C; he goes off to the side, he loses it.
Sayles probably never gave much thought to being a great cop either, but he was.
Another man to value his privacy, too. Kept things to himself. Thought others didn’t know what was going on—like this thing with Josie. Sure, he didn’t have the details, she was sick, some kind of breakdown maybe, but anyone close to Sayles who paid attention couldn’t help but see the changes in him from day to day. Man was being buffeted. Graves would look over and catch him just sitting at the computer, motionless, and know he’d slipped sideways to somewhere else. Graves would look away, never said anything. You wanted privacy for yourself, you respected that of others.
Then there was this Rankin thing. Not that he was talking about it a lot, but he wasn’t talking much about other cases either. And his not talking about it was kind of the point, wasn’t it?
Probably had no idea that Graves knew how hard he was reaching out on this. Dolls. What was that all about? And why the secrecy, when it was their case, they were both supposed to be working it?
He’d walked past and caught the screen a couple of times, Sayles back-and-forthing with a guy Graves suspected had something to do with all this.
One thing Graves did, he paid attention.
The beer had gone half warm but he drank it anyway, in a long swallow. Moments later he felt dizzy. From one damn beer. Another of the many delights of aging.
As it alit on the rim of the fake fountain that Graves always forgot to fill with water, a grackle screeched, stabbing its curved beak to the right and left. An appeal? Indignation? Warning other birds off? Lonely?
Who the hell knew.
He set the empty bottle on the glider arm, rocked to see how far or fast he could go before the bottle fell.
Maybe he was making too much of it. The scene in the courtroom and that night in the jail cell had shaken him, no doubt about it. So maybe he wasn’t thinking quite right. Still jazzed, or still beat down. Or both at the same time.
When the bottle fell, the grackle fixed him with its black eyes and squawked loudly enough to wake people three houses down. The bottle rolled and rolled, bouncing on the seams between floorboards.
A PIED-À-TERRE. A foothold. Something he wouldn’t need for long, but for now it would do him well. When had he last had a fixed address of any sort?
What with not having to find motel rooms and be on the move, this meant one less thing to deal with. Of course, in taking the apartment he had become marginally visible. But no one—another
of course
—was looking. Or would have reason to do so.
The kid was out there playing chess by himself at the picnic table under the lemon tree. He had what Christian surmised was a fake cell phone. He’d make a move, speak into the phone, reach across to move the other player’s pieces, then make his own move. Then back to the phone.
Christian picked the apartment for its proximity to a coffeehouse whose Wi-Fi he could piggyback. The ad had been on the bulletin board there, small free-standing apartment, furnished, private. One of those bottom fringes of phone numbers to tear off, but no one had.
It was half a garage behind the house, flanked on one side by bushes, on another by a sloppily mortared wall of slump block, on the third by palm trees, cholla and ocotillo. The garage half was only used for storage, the woman said. There was a good single bed with linens, a sturdy Formica-topped kitchen table, a couple of chairs, a battered black-and-white TV, a bureau with four drawers and mismatched handles, shelves on L brackets on two walls and above the toilet in the bathroom. The front window looked toward the house, rear window onto the palms and narrow alley behind.
Late afternoon now, what would be his favorite time of day if he had one, and Christian was lying on the bed, atop a plaid bedspread, counting holes in the acoustic-tile ceiling.
As a young man he’d done a single stretch in jail, in a bohunk Arkansas prison that served as warehouse for offenders of every sort, murderers to drunks and wetbrains to the seriously disturbed, from all the small towns around the state that had no place to put them, a square mile of real estate jammed to the gills with residents, equal part army barracks, high-school locker room, and killing field. This was not long after he got out of the service, when he was pretty messed up. He took his lesson from that residence: stay off the radar, fly near the treetops—always.
It was a sad excuse for decent human habitation, paint thin on the walls as though merely smeared on in passing, nothing close to plumb, cement floors crumbling away like stale crackers. Whatever contractor bid the job had pocketed a lot of money. The guards didn’t look much better constructed or more durable than the walls or floor. Over the years they’d got real good at staying out of the way.
First night there, two guys held him down while another one, a squat crew-cut guy with arm muscles like Popeye’s, raped him.
Staying off the radar wasn’t the only thing he learned in that prison. That was also where he took to heart the virtues of planning. He bode his time, watched without looking, took notice. Where the men were, who they hung out with and when, work details, cellmates, pastimes.
First one, he caught in the auto shop. He, Boyd was his name, wasn’t supposed to be there alone, but he had a deal with one of the guards. Christian put him out with a tire iron, tied him down. Then he put a funnel in his mouth and poured in a mix of battery acid and industrial solvent. Afterward, the funnel sat there cockeyed beside Boyd’s head like the Tin Man’s hat.
Jaco, the second, had his throat slit late one night in his bunk. The cell lock had been slipped with a thin sheet of metal. The cut was ragged, torn as much as slit. Chisels will do that. No one else in the cell saw a thing.
Christian waited for the third, the rapist himself, giving the man time to put it together, letting it build. He didn’t kill that one, who went by the name Jade. He taped Jade down with duct tape as he slept, sat on his face, and took off his genitals with a loop of guitar string and two wood handles.
After that, he hadn’t had any more trouble.
Late enough now that shadows lurked in corners, moving when he looked away, invisible when he looked straight on. Christian arched his back against the bed, trying to ease aching hips. Vertebrae in his neck and upper back popped in sequence, like a line of firecrackers going off.
Stay off the radar. Planning. That was what he’d learned. Things always went wrong, sure they did, but you learned to cope. To adapt, to improvise, to dodge, to divert.
But this?
Through usual channels you get the contact, the interview, the job. You compile information, reconnoiter, keep eyes and mind open. You’re never able to get all the ducks in a row, but you line up as many as you can, the ones you have eyes on, the ones you suspect may be quacking about offstage. You know the location, how you’re getting in, how you’re getting out, your timetable. You step up—and someone else has just taken down your target.
What kind of sense does that make?
An insect—a spider carrying prey, he thought at first, then realized it was a beetle of some kind, with its wing case sprung open on one side—came from the corner about a third of the way across the ceiling and stopped there, just over the bed.
A freakish coincidence that Rankin was shot moments before Christian closed in?
Freakish
, he had no problem with. That’s how life was.
Coincidence
, though …
That was hard to swallow.
Difficult to believe that someone else had randomly targeted Rankin. Or that chance circumstance had brought the shooter into Rankin’s presence at the very moment that Christian was stepping up.
Okay. So where did that take him?
He’d been thinking that he was still invisible, that no one would come looking for him, no one would even know to look for him. But what if he was wrong?
What you always had to do was stand off, try to see it all from a different angle. It wasn’t about you. He’d spent most of a lifetime doing just that.
But maybe he was wrong. Maybe it
was
about him. He was in the equation—so maybe he was an integral part of it.
He got up and walked to the window, looked out to where the kid was setting up another game, and went back to the bed.
The beetle had retreated to its corner. How long had it lived here in this room, with that crushed wing and case? What did it live on?
None of them suffered, he thought as he began to fall asleep. He could feel his mind break loose of its moorings, start to float free. None of them suffered, they all went quickly. Too much suffering in the world already. The problem comes when you start believing that the suffering, all that untold, endless suffering, has to have meaning.
A wash of images ran through his mind as he settled further into sleep. Faces, hands, his fifth-grade classroom, a sunrise he once viewed in Kentucky, a deer’s body bloated and boiling with maggots at roadside, people taken over and rendered emotionless by aliens, villagers with torches climbing toward the castle, narrow corridors down which he scampered lost and late for appointments, the tunnels back in ’Nam, the ceiling above the bed in the room where he grew up.
That stained plaster ceiling gave way to this one as he drifted up out of sleep, seeing again the man’s face that had turned to him from within the car outside Rankin’s house, the man he’d seen back in Rankin’s hospital room.
The man wasn’t searching for Rankin, or keeping tabs on him. He knew where Rankin was. And from the look of things Rankin wouldn’t be going anywhere.
He had been looking for Christian.
