Survival of the Fittest

by Jonathan Kellerman

  Alone with Baker.

  “My neck hurts,” I said, throwing out another cue, but my faith was dying. “Can these restraints be loosened?”

  Baker shook his head. The needle was back in his hand.

  “Potassium chloride,” I repeated. “Same as Ponsico.”

  Baker didn't answer.

  “Raymond's shoes,” I said. “Nothing random, everything had a reason. Irit Carmeli's murder simulated a sex crime. Her mother read you as a sexual aggressor, so the payback had to have sexual overtones. But you needed to differentiate yourself from just another pervert. You and Nolan. He got off on dominating little girls.”

  Baker showed me his back again.

  “Was Irit mostly Nolan, or both of you? Because I think you shared Nolan's tastes. Young girls— dark girls. Girls like Latvinia. Did you do her yourself or with Tenney's help? Or someone else I haven't had the pleasure of meeting?”

  He didn't budge.

  “Like Ponsico,” I said, “Nolan lacked the will eventually. More important, he had some sort of conscience, what he did eventually got to him. You sent him to Lehmann but it didn't help. How'd you prevent him from bringing you down?”

  No answer.

  “The sister,” I said. “You told him what you'd do to her if he destroyed anyone but himself. And if his will had failed again and he didn't eat his gun, you'd have taken care of him?”

  His left shoulder twitched. “Think of it as euthanasia. He was suffering from a terminal disease.”

  “Which one?”

  “Malignant regrets.” I heard him laugh. “Now we'll have to get the sister, anyway. Because you might have educated her.”

  “I didn't.”

  “Who else knows besides Sturgis?”

  “No one.”

  “Well,” he said. “We'll see about that. . . . I've always liked North Carolina, the horse country. Spent some time years ago, raising Thoroughbreds.”

  “Why doesn't that surprise me?”

  He turned around and smiled. “Horses are immensely strong. Horses kick hard.”

  “More killing, more fun.”

  “You're right about that.”

  “So ideology— eugenics— had nothing to do with it.”

  He shook his head. “Strip away what passes for motives and motivation, Alex, and the sad truth remains: For the most part, we simply do things because we can.”

  “You killed people to prove you were able to get—”

  “No, not to prove it. Simply because I could. Same reason you pick your nose when you think no one's watching.”

  The silencing finger touched my lips. “How many ants have you stepped on during your lifetime? Millions? Tens of millions? How much time have you spent regretting the fact that you committed ant genocide?”

  “Ants and people—”

  “It's all tissue, organic material— jumbles of carbon. So simple, until we elevated apes come along and complicate things with superstition. Remove God from the equation and you're left with a reduction as rich and delicious as the finest sauce: It's all tissue, it's all temporary.”

  He righted his glasses. “Which is not to say I don't create my own excuses. Everyone does, everyone has a cutoff point. For you, it's ants, perhaps you'd spare a snake. Someone else might not. Others draw the line at vertebrates, mammals with fur, whichever arbitrary criterion defines lovable or cute or sacred.”

  He straightened, looked wistful. “You can't really understand unless you travel and expose yourself to different ways of thinking. In Bangkok— a beautiful, putrid, very scary city— I met a man, a master chef, artist with a Chinese cleaver. He was working in a luxury hotel, preparing banquets for tourists and politicians, but before that he ran his own restaurant in a harbor district where tourists never go. His forte was cutting— slicing, cubing, julienning at unbelievable speed. We smoked opium together several times and eventually I gained his trust. He told me he'd trained as a child, working his way up to sharper and sharper knives. Over thirty years he'd cut everything— sea slugs, grasshoppers, shrimp, frogs, snakes, beef, lamb, monkeys, baboons, chimpanzees.”

  Smile. “You know the punch line. Under the knife, it all splits apart.”

  “Then why even bother picking targets?” I said. “If it's a game, why not just strike randomly?”

  “Deconditioning takes time.”

  “The troops need a rationale.”

  “The troops,” he said, amused.

  “So you gave them one: inferior tissue. Your ants.”

  “I didn't give anyone anything,” he said. “Deafness is inferior to hearing, retardation is inferior to an adequate intellect, not being able to wipe your own anus is inferior to studying philosophy. There is intrinsic value in cleaning house.”

  “New Utopia,” I said, fighting to speak clearly, calmly. Was anyone listening? “Survival of the fittest.”

  He shook his head again, Mr. Scoutmaster showing a dull scout how to tie a complex knot for the fiftieth time. “Spare me the sloppy compassion. Without the fittest there will be no survival. Retardates don't discover cures for diseases. Spastics don't steer jumbo jets. Too many of the unfit, and we'll all be enduring, not living. The way Willy was forced to endure that bathroom.”

  He removed his glasses, cleaned them with a tissue. The house was silent.

  “A nice mix,” I said. “Pop philosophy and sadistic fun.”

  “Fun is good,” he said. “What else do we have to show for our time on this planet?”

  He raised the syringe again. No help coming, but play for time, time was all I had.

  “Melvin Myers,” I said. “A blind man trying to live a normal life. What was his sin? Learning something about Lehmann while fooling with the computers? Embezzlement? Shunting grant money to New Utopia?”

  Big smile. “Ah, the irony,” he said. “Money allocated for the inferior finally used productively. Myers, that place— pathetic.”

  “Myers was intelligent.”

  “It's all the same.”

  “Damaged tissue.”

  “Spoiled meat can be gussied up and sautÉed, but it remains unfit for consumption. The blind don't lead the blind. The blind get led around like barnyard animals.”

  He aimed the needle at the ceiling, squirting liquid. A toilet flushed. Footsteps, again.

  I heard Tenney's voice. “Whew, no more Mexican for me.”

  Baker tapped the syringe.

  No rescue.

  Daniel, Milo— how could you abandon me?

  My body started to shake. “You can't hope to—”

  “Hope has nothing to do with it,” said Baker. “What you know amounts to supposition but no evidence. The same goes for Sturgis. The game needs to end. Here's a true test of your belief system: Is there an afterlife? Now you'll find out. Or”— he smiled—“you won't.”

  “DVLL. You're the new devils?”

  The needle caught ceiling light, sparking white.

  His mouth tightened. Irritated. “How many foreign languages do you speak?”

  “Some Spanish. I learned a little Latin in school.”

  “I speak eleven,” he said.

  “All that travel.”

  “Travel enriches.”

  “What language is DVLL?”

  “German,” he said. “Nothing like the Goths when it comes to matters of principle. The crispness, none of that useless Gallic lassitude.”

  Zena's comments about French. Parroting her guru.

  The needle lowered.

  “So what does it mean?” I said.

  No answer. He'd turned grave, almost sad.

  Daniel, Milo . . . the limits of friendship . . . just another delusion . . .

  “Potassium chloride?” I tried for the third time. “Freelance executioner. At least the state offers sedation.”

  Tenney said, “The state offers a last meal and prayers and a blindfold because the state's game is insincerity— pretending to be humane.”

  He laughed very loudly. “The
state actually takes the time to sterilize the injection site with alcohol. Protecting against what? The state is an ass.”

  “Don't worry,” said Baker. “Your heart will explode, it won't take long.”

  “Dust to dust, carbon to carbon.”

  “Clever. Too bad we never got a chance to spend more quality time together.”

  “Executed,” I said, barely able to restrain the scream that kept growing within me. “What's my crime?”

  “Oh, Alex,” he said. “I'm so disappointed in you. You still don't understand.”

  “Understand what?”

  A sad shake of his head. “There are no crimes, only errors.”

  “Then why'd you become a cop?”

  The needle lowered a bit. “Because police work offers so much opportunity.”

  “For power.”

  “No, power's for politicians. What law enforcement offers is choice. Possibilities. Order and disorder, crime and punishment. Playing the rules like a card hustler.”

  “When to fold, when to draw,” I said. Stall, stretch every second, don't look at the needle. Robin— “Who to arrest, who to let go.”

  “Exactly,” he said. “Fun.”

  “Who gets to live,” I said, “who doesn't. How many others have you killed?”

  “I stopped counting long ago. Because it doesn't matter. That's the point, Alex: Everything is matter and nothing matters.”

  “Then why bother to kill me?”

  “Because I want to.”

  “Because you can.”

  He came closer. “Not a single one of them was missed . . . no impact, nothing changed. It made me realize what I should have known years before: Sensation is all. One passes the time in the least onerous way possible. I like to clean house.”

  “A sweeper,” I said, and when he didn't answer: “The elite takes out the trash.”

  “There are no elites. Just those with fewer impediments. Willy and I will end up worm-food like everyone else.”

  “Smarter worms, though,” said Tenney. He grinned at me. “See you for chess in hell. You supply the board.”

  “Sensation is all,” I said to Baker.

  Baker put down the needle again, unbuttoned his shirt, and spread the placket.

  His chest was tan, hairless, a grotesque plane of ravaged flesh.

  Scores of scars, some threadlike, others raised and welted.

  He displayed himself proudly, rebuttoned. “I thought of myself as a blank canvas, decided to draw. Please don't talk to me about mercy.”

  “At least tell me about DVLL.”

  “Oh, that,” he said, dismissively. “Just a quotation from Herr Shickelgruber. Pure mediocrity, that one, those sickening watercolors, but he did have a way with a phrase.”

  “Mein Kampf?” I said.

  He got very close. Sweet breath, soap-and-water skin. How did he tolerate Tenney?

  “ “Die vernichtung lebensunwerten Leben,' ” he said. “ “Lives not worth living.' Which applies, I'm afraid, to yours.”

  Tenney moved in and held my right hand down, elbow to the mattress. Oh, Milo, the bastard is right, nothing matters in the end, nothing's fair— fingertips drummed the crook of my arm, raising a vein.

  Baker lifted the syringe.

  “Happy heart attack,” he said.

  Robin— Mom— go out with style, don't scream, don't scream— I prepared for the jab, nervous system crashing, alarm bells jingling—

  Nothing.

  Baker straightened. Perturbed.

  Still the jingling.

  The doorbell.

  “Shit,” said Tenney.

  “Go see who it is, Willy, and be careful.”

  Clang. The needle disappeared and in its place Baker held a machine pistol— black, banana-shaped handle, rectangular body, nasty little barrel.

  He looked around the room.

  The bell rang again. Stopped. Three knocks. More bell.

  I heard Tenney's rapid climb up the stairs.

  Voices.

  Tenney's, the other high-pitched.

  A woman?

  Her voice, Tenney's, hers.

  “No,” I heard Tenney say, “you've got the wrong—”

  Baker moved toward the door, pistol held high.

  The woman's voice again, irate.

  “I'm telling you,” said Tenney, “that this—”

  Then, a low, muffled stutter that could only be one thing. More footsteps, racing, as Baker pointed the machine pistol at the door, ready.

  Thunder behind him— breaking glass, a glass roar— from behind the curtains, then a flute arpeggio of tinkling shards as the curtains parted and men burst in shooting.

  More stutter, much louder.

  Baker never had a chance to see them. His pink shirtback sucked up crimson and the rear of his head dissolved in a red-brown mist.

  The front of his head followed, facial features blanketed in red oil and white jelly, the substructure disintegrating, features losing integrity, turning to port wine. Melting. A wax figure melting.

  His chest exploded and soft things flew out, plunking wetly against the wall.

  One of the shooters ran to me. Young, sharp-featured, black hair. One of the guards I'd seen at the consulate. Behind him, a big, heavy, white-haired black man in navy blue sweats. Older, at least sixty. He glanced at Baker's body, then at me.

  The young, hawk-faced man began undoing my restraints, only to be yanked away.

  By Milo, disheveled, wet-eyed, sweating, breathing hard.

  “Sir,” said the young man, Milo's big hand still on his arm.

  “Get lost! Do your job and I'll do mine.”

  The young man hesitated for a second, then left. Milo freed me. “Oh, Alex, such a fuckup, such a goddamn idiotic fuckup, I'm so— oh, man, we almost lost you— it really went bad— never again, never fucking again!”

  “You always were one for drama,” I said.

  “Shut up,” he said. “Just shut up and rest— man, I am so sorry, I will never let you talk me—”

  “Shut up yourself.”

  He lifted me.

  He carried me past Baker, lying in a broth of gore, crossed the white room, now candy-striped, bits of brain and bone a free-form collage. Out to the stairs. Tenney's corpse was sprawled on top.

  “Up we go.” His breathing was too hard, too fast. I felt strong enough to walk and told him so.

  “No way.”

  “I'm okay, put me down.”

  “All right, but we've got to get the hell out of here. Be careful not to trip over that piece of shit.”

  A woman came into view at the top of the stairs. Very short, heavyset. Rosy cheeks, bulbous nose.

  Irina Budzhyshyn, proprietress of the Hermes Language School. Small pistol in her hand, nothing fancy.

  In her Russian accent, she said, “No one else in the house. Get him out of here and then we bring in the cleanup crew.”

  A man appeared behind her, in black. Late twenties but already bald on top with a brown mustache and goatee.

  He was breathing hard, too. Everyone was.

  “I've got transport,” he said in a thick voice. Not acknowledging me, though we'd met.

  The landlord at Irina's building— what name had he used? Laurel. Phil Laurel. As in Hardy.

  Everyone's a comedian.

  60

  We got into Rick's Porsche.

  Milo said, “You all right?”

  “I'm fine.” I was coated with icy sweat and fought not to shake.

  He made a too-fast U-turn and raced down the hill.

  “Oh, man,” he said. “What a—”

  “Forget it.”

  “Sure, forget it. Biggest fuckup of my life— forget it is exactly what I won't do— how the hell could I have been so goddamn stupid—!”

  “What happened?”

  “I got ambushed is what happened. Sudden meeting with a deputy chief. Sharavi was pulled off, too, by his own people. Til I found out, I thought he set it up— did
you see an older black guy in there?”