The Killer Is Dying: A Novel

by James Sallis

  He sold a few more things that way, furniture, his mother’s silver dollars, but he knew it was a dead end and that soon enough, one way or another, he was bound to get jammed up. So without preconceptions he took to skulking on eBay, Craigslist, and a dozen or more local Web listings, keeping an eye out, hopscotching back and forth, buying tentatively, selling quickly at low profit. Misfires and grief early on, but then he had it.

  Toys.

  Every once in a while some other collectable, lunchboxes in particular, but mostly toys. The market was widespread, huge, and absurd. One day he sold a two-level garage and service center made from tin for $1,200. Pickaninny figures and items linked to TV shows from long before he was born routinely brought in hundreds apiece. Someone in the UK paid $326 for a plastic ukulele that, though in perfect condition, looked as though it had been left out in the sun too long and begun melting.

  Prices, though, had been rising steadily, as had (he surmised) the number of those like himself troubling the waters. Already he was looking to sidestep. And while he wasn’t sure of the market yet, still sounding that out, he was thinking hand tools. Adzes, awls, planes, levels, reamers, miter boxes. Woodworker’s tools.

  He wrote the last check, entered check number, date, payee, and amount in the ledger, slipped the last check and payment slip into the envelope, sealed it. Then turned the stack of envelopes faceup and stamped each one. Also on each went a sticker from a thick roll:

  James & Paula Kostof

  1534 Dalmont

  Phoenix, AZ 85014

  The bills went back into the manila envelope, which he marked with the date. He noted again, as he always did, that the ampersand, that &, was the largest figure on the sticker.

  Still, he wasn’t sleepy.

  He brewed a second cup of tea and stood at the window. Never much traffic out here after eight or so. A battered truck, white gone gray, swayed by on bad shocks, Food for the Soul painted in an arc of rainbow letters on its side with, below that, pictographs of a bowl of steaming food and a Bible.

  Sitting at the table beside the window, he clicked on the computer to run his Greatest Hits.

  Like Downer Loads with its ever-changing headlines: “Secret Love Nest Found in Abandoned Warehouse,” “Sadistic Skipper Drowns Parrot,” “Thalidomide Victim Becomes Concert Violinist,” “Water Will Kill You.” Or his all-time personal favorite, “Coyotes Protect Alien Baby.”

  Like The Great Illusion America, flogging books, pamphlets and DVDs about the new world order, conspiracies that spiraled back thousands of years, Marines awakening from comas with memories of covert actions on Mars, simple sources of free energy, obtaining New Zealand citizenship, and releasing the secret power inside you.

  Like The Real Triangle, which explained how we are being poisoned by the sea of microwaves washing over us: transmission towers (“500 in L.A. Alone!”), Wi-Fi, cell phones. Put an egg between two cell phones, the home page suggested. Use one cell phone to call the other. Within an hour the egg will be fully cooked.

  All of them sites he’d stumbled across one way or another, and now visited daily.

  Sometimes as he sat looking out the window, looking into the screen, it occurred to him that he collected the sites—puerile at best, possibly pernicious—the way others seized on Hopalong Cassidy lunchboxes, toy garages, and plastic ukuleles. He didn’t understand their attraction, why these sites drew him, but they’d become a refuge.

  The best, he always saved for last.

  Traveler’s comments had started appearing five years before. At first, they seemed just another blog: current events, oil supplies, immigration, foreign policy. Nothing, though, of the entertainment gossip, personal opinions, and political teeter-tottering that filled most blogs. Rarely much about people at all, in fact—just events. Jimmie had checked out the archives, followed the trail backward.

  Then things Traveler had spoken of hypothetically—gas shortages, an election debacle, a flood in the Midwest—actually occurred. As the site became progressively more predictive than discursive, Traveler’s anonymity moderated as well. We, then I, came into use, hints were dropped, passing comments that over time coalesced to confession: she was a soldier sent back from the year 2063 on a mission she could not divulge. Interspersed with an oddly impersonal memoir, the predictions continued, some scarily on target, others wildly amiss. Three years to the day after the first blog, following shortly upon an entry headlined “I Haven’t Much Time Left,” Traveler stopped posting.

  Others had kept the Web site going, so that it was now a vast beehive of commentary, speculation, testimonials, exegesis, and silliness accrued about the original postings and growing day by day, even to the point of a biography cobbled together from Traveler’s entries, on-site “scholarship,” and, it would seem, an imagination spawned of early and ongoing exposure to Star Trek.

  Jimmie scrolled down the line of recent postings, clicking on those whose blurbs caught his interest, reading a sentence here, half an entry there. Many had quotations from Traveler’s entries as epigraphs in smaller typeface above their own.

  When I found Traveler, I was really messed up, stupid, and hopeless. I’m still messed-up, but that’s just one out of three. I keep hearing all this “Give something back” and “Make a difference” crap, and all this stuff about how something changed your life, and mostly that’s what it is, crap. But it seems to me that Traveler really did give something back, and made a difference. She sure did for me—and my life doesn’t look much like it did before.

  Truth is something you catch only out of the side of your eye; look straight on, and it’s gone.

  When I was 16 I went to my parents and said I had something to tell them.

  “O my God, you’ve got little Alice pregnant!” my mom said.

  “No.”

  “You’re gay,” my father said.

  “No. It’s worse: I want to be a writer.”

  That same sense of purpose, that I’d discovered my place in the world, my direction, came to me when I found these writings.

  I came home last night and burned the bed. It’s no good without you in it.

  The firemen are here now.

  I was a great disappointment to my folks. They had always assumed I’d take over the funeral home that had been in my family for six generations. Instead, I became a doctor. Worked emergency first, then went back and certified in pediatrics. Now I take care of newborns. Some weigh a pound—you can fit them in the palm of your hand. My wife calls them frogs. “How were your frogs today?” I look at them sometimes and wonder what these tiny bodies will turn into (the ones who live), what kind of burdens and disappointments their parents will carry around.

  “I looked over in the bed where my best friend used to lay.”—Willie McTell

  Truth is, of course, relative. But then, so is relative.

  He scrolled back to a headline he’d passed up before:

  Something had been coming from a long way off for a long time. I always knew that. Then one day I woke up and there it was.

  “Ride the devil, boy, or it’ll ride you.”

  Intrigued, he tracked through a slurry of pointless anecdotes, embarrassingly candid memoirs, quotations from popular songs, a half acre of bad journalism and worse psychology, to the original post.

  The first kill, you never forget.

  About rabbit hunting, as it turned out, how the writer and his old man used to go out together in “black Texas woods,” how it had made a man of him, but Jimmie was left with aftershocks of the tremor that surged through him on reading that initial sentence.

  The sudden gush of warmth, then a feeling as though his body were floating upward, floating away, before the world went dark around him.

  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 i
ts wings, but of course he couldn’t. He imagined its small mouth making sounds.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  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.

&
nbsp; “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, O2 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.