Rage Against the Dying

by Becky Masterman

  Thirty-one

  Rather than going home and having to pretend, I drove straight down into the city, stopping at a Bruegger’s for black coffee and a plain bagel to absorb its acid. I tried Coleman’s phone again, still no answer, still no message. She had contacted the office just the day before, but why not me? Why was she avoiding me?

  I flipped open the phone I had found at Peasil’s and checked for phone numbers he had called. I tried them all, and they were all on the level of food delivery. If he had spoken to anyone more sinister than Papa John’s Pizza, he had deleted that number. Yet I thought about how a deleted number could lead to the Route 66 killer. For an experienced digital technician the phone in my hand might hold both the identity of the real killer as well as the evidence to get me arrested for Peasil’s murder. I tucked it back in my tote, making a mental note to find a good hacker outside the Bureau.

  I killed an hour calling all the numbers on the phone, getting more and more frustrated with a powerlessness I had never known when I had a badge. Feeling like a pressure cooker was getting me nowhere, so around ten thirty I headed over to the federal courthouse, where I knew Floyd Lynch was being brought to make his official plea.

  Parking at the courthouse was a bitch, and so was finding a place to stand on the steps. Tucson hadn’t seen the likes of a serial killer since the sixties when an Elvis-looking young man dubbed the Pied Piper of Tucson was picking off high school girls. Everybody was at the courthouse, local and national news teams, and it was pretty funny to see Three-Piece Morrison; Adams Vance, the federal prosecutor; and Royal Hughes, the public defender, all jockeying for position in front of the cameras.

  From where I stood I could only hear Morrison’s answers to the reporters.

  “—proud of our fine local and federal law enforcement agents, including Deputy Sheriff Maxwell Coyote and our own Special Agent Laura Coleman, who succeeded in the capture of the man who will no doubt prove to be one of this century’s most active serial killers.”

  “—that’s correct, initial interrogations quickly led to a voluntary confession of no less than eight murders dating back to 1998, the last victim found on his truck when we arrested him.”

  I scanned the crowd for Coleman.

  My eyes lit instead on Zachariah Robertson.

  At first there was that same cognitive disconnect that I had experienced when I saw the photos of myself taken from Gerald Peasil’s van. My brain had to catch up with the sight of Zach and realize that he had not gotten on the plane back to Michigan after all.

  He was nearly hidden behind a cameraman from Fox News Tucson. He was watching me.

  Zach and I had been together at one of those times in life when there is raw feeling with no skin on it. You get to know people at those times like you do at no other. We both knew what was happening now. I could see it in his eyes, in the sag of his mouth, open slightly, panting like a nervous dog.

  “—Floyd Lynch was twenty-six at the time of the first murder.”

  “—yes, except for two of the victims, we have identification. One of the unidentifieds is a Mexican alien who had been picked up after crossing the border illegally. It’s for reasons like this that the FBI has been so intensively involved, besides the fact that the crimes crossed state lines and therefore fell under federal jurisdiction.”

  “—correct, all the victims were women.”

  It became imperative that I make my way through the crowd to reach Zach’s side. I struggled to get through the press of the crowd, muttering “FBI, FBI,” which had an effect on the regular bystanders but not on the journalists, who held fast to the space they had managed to acquire and would not give way an inch if I was the pope with a case of diarrhea. Still, I was pushing my way through as best I could when a wave of recognition went through the crowd, a sheriff’s car pulled up, and Max got out, followed by a handcuffed Lynch.

  “—Lynch has provided enough detailed information at quite extensive interrogations, some of which was withheld from the public, so that we have no doubt of his confession.”

  “Max,” I called. He was closer to Zach than I was. I wanted him to be aware. Max looked around at the sound of his name, but didn’t see me.

  A couple of extra sheriff’s deputies forced a path through the crowd.

  “—that’s a question better suited for Federal Prosecutor Adams Vance.”

  Morrison stepped out of the way for Vance, who, being a short man, adjusted the microphone slightly. “—yes, he has been declared competent to make those confessions. Floyd Lynch is not insane.”

  “Max,” I called again. This time he found me, but his recognition wasn’t the way it would have been a couple days before. Beyond meeting my eyes, he didn’t acknowledge me, didn’t nod or wave or lift his chin to question what’s up. If anything, he looked a trifle apprehensive as if I might be the dangerous one. He said something to a deputy standing close-by. The deputy looked at me.

  “Zach,” I called more loudly and pointed at the man. But Max had already turned away and moved out of earshot, and the deputy didn’t seem to make any sense of what I said.

  I started to see the scene in different ways, all twined together. Maybe it was Lynch’s upper lip that triggered this, the way it protruded a bit. My attention following the rest of the crowd’s, I turned to watch him for the first time since seeing his interrogation video.

  “—Floyd Lynch is scheduled to make his plea before Judge Sewall at eleven thirty this morning.”

  I remembered the Lynch I saw at the dump site, and how he now looked more like a sickly animal who doesn’t know why the dogs are snapping at him.

  Next to that memory there was another, much older one, from well before my days with the Bureau. I was sitting in front of the TV waiting for Mom to get us some sandwiches. We’d been to the eleven o’clock service, what Dad called the Alka-Seltzer Mass, because he said all the people with hangovers went to that one. It was just a bit before Thanksgiving, and because this was Florida we pretended it wasn’t so hot and had the windows open.

  The program I was watching was broken into by a news bulletin.

  A rare live broadcast. Outside shot of an armored car. Inside shot, lots of photographers with those cameras where the flashbulb attachment is bigger than the camera itself. All suits except one dressed in a white shirt and thin pullover sweater.

  Not a white hat; no one was wearing hats at the courthouse. Then, not enough security, I thought, and pushed harder, trying to decide whether it was better to get to Zach first or Lynch first or make a big enough scene so Max would be forced to pay attention.

  In the broadcast I was remembering, a man stepped out of the crowd of reporters, a thickish man who got too close. He raised a weapon and fired it into the other man’s stomach. Someone in a white suit who was leaning forward, clearing a way through the reporters, jerked his hands back to his body, his head back over his chest and even his lips back from his teeth as if every part of his body was intuitively drawing back from the line of fire.

  I was the only one who knew, in a way, that this was happening again, and I failed to stop it.

  Too late, as Lynch got halfway up the steps, Zach broke from the crowd, ran forward, and yelled, “Lynch!” As the man turned, Zach fired a single shot at Lynch’s gut. Lynch closed his eyes, opened his mouth in a soundless groan, and clutched his stomach. And there was the lip, curled up over his teeth. Startled, Max jerked his hands back to his body, his head back over his chest and his lips back from his teeth as if every part of his body was intuitively drawing back from the line of fire.

  Too late to reach Lynch, I turned my attention back to Zach. He looked at me again, gave the first smile I’d seen in seven years, which made him a totally different man, lifted the gun again. The crowd went wilder, the camera crews simultaneously ducked and raised their equipment over their heads to capture someone getting killed.

  At the Texas police station it had been a snub-nosed Colt Cobra .38, the victim had been Lee Ha
rvey Oswald, and the killer had been a small-time Nevada crook named Jack Ruby. Unlike that weapon, the one Zach used was just a .22, not much of a gun. But different from that time, rather than allowing himself to be taken by the police officers, Zach pressed the trigger and shot himself in the head.

  Thirty-two

  Once Zach dropped and the gun fell from his hand, photographers and cameramen swarmed forward while crouching down, staying low for fear of more gunfire but keeping their equipment raised overhead for the sake of a Pulitzer. Security from the courthouse swarmed back, linking arms, able to at least keep an opening for the emergency med techs who showed up within a long two minutes, one ambulance taking Lynch away and the other taking Zach. I wormed my way onto the latter and sat with Zach while the EMTs worked. He wasn’t used to firearms, the gun must have kicked, and he was aiming high to begin with, so death wasn’t immediate. He wanted to talk. I tried to shush him, but the paramedic told me it was better, with a brain injury, to keep him conscious.

  “Got ’im,” Zach said, with a physical effort that went beyond anything I’d personally known.

  “You sure did, buddy.” I glanced at the blood on his shirt, the blowback from Lynch mixed with that of his own head wound. You could still see the package creases in this shirt, too. He had put on a new shirt to kill Lynch.

  Zach ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth, moistening it enough to speak. “No life.”

  I assumed he was talking about Lynch’s sentence just then, but he could have been talking about himself, that his own just wasn’t worth it anymore. I took his hand in mine, stroked it with the other. “Zach, dearest, why didn’t you talk to me?”

  His eyes started to go up into his head and then came back down again. He grimaced with a sudden pain. “Dead?” he asked.

  I wasn’t sure. “Sure Zach, he’s dead.”

  He was having a harder time moving his tongue but managed to get out, “Gla?”

  “Totally glad,” I said, though it was just another lie because now I’d never find out who really killed Jessica. “Zach … Zach? Stay with me, Zach.”

  Then Zach died.

  I leaned back out of the way so the paramedics could do what they were supposed to do, but I knew it wouldn’t do any good. You could never change Zach’s mind once he’d made it up. I saw a bit of plastic protruding from his shirt pocket and drew out Jessica’s photograph. I spit on it and wiped it off against my own shirt, the lamination keeping the blood from sticking to it. I rode the rest of the way to the hospital, and helped with the paperwork. Told them how to get a hold of his estranged son, who was the closest next of kin and who I imagined would be the person to deal with his body. Jessica’s body, too.

  Thirty-three

  I stopped in the bathroom off the emergency room lobby to wash the blood off my hands and got a ride back to my car at the courthouse. Driving back up to Catalina I wondered what it would be like if I could talk about all this with Carlo. Forty-five minutes later I pulled into the garage and went into the house to get slammed anew.

  I barely noticed that Carlo was not his usual serene self. Shoving the Pugs away with my foot, with a quick hi to him where he sat at his desk, not noticing he had his head in his hands and even if he did whether it was because he couldn’t get his checkbook balanced, I went into the bedroom to change my clothes before he saw Zach’s blood on them.

  Jane’s satin bedspread was tossed onto the reading chair in the corner of the bedroom and the bed was stripped.

  The bed was stripped and the sheets were nowhere to be seen.

  The bedding must be in the laundry room.

  Without trying to appear normal I ran from the bedroom to the laundry room, where I saw the bedding in a heap on the floor. I opened the washing machine and saw the clothes that I had been wearing and forgotten about the day I killed Peasil. They weren’t smashed against the sides of the basin the way you usually see clothes after the spin cycle; they had been moved. They had been examined.

  I was aware of Carlo standing behind me, not touching me.

  I wanted to tell him everything, starting from, oh, about thirty years before and ending with the suicide of my rookie’s father, but instead, “You don’t do laundry,” I said stupidly, looking at a still-pale-burgundy-colored patch that the bleach had failed to remove from the denim blouse.

  His voice sounded aggrieved. “I was trying to help out,” he said. “You haven’t seemed yourself after your … fall.”

  I turned around and faced him, no longer thinking of the fresh blood on my blouse. Compared with what he knew now, it was trivial. Carlo didn’t seem to notice the blood. I wanted to lift my hand to touch his face in comfort or supplication, but I had drained out of myself and couldn’t take the chance of trying to touch him. I didn’t have to ask what he knew. He was very helpful and gestured toward the washing machine.

  “I was going to put them in the dryer, but they were already dry after so many days. And then there were. Stains. I don’t know if you’ll get the stains out.”

  He was saying these little mundane things, but his eyes were begging me for something else, something much bigger, like an explanation that would erase what he was thinking.

  “He,” I began, perhaps intending to explain how I had been assaulted and killed the horrible man in self-defense. But something told me none of that mattered. What mattered is that I had killed a man and hidden it from Carlo and I couldn’t deny that looked bad.

  I turned back and opened the door of a cabinet and pulled out the box of garbage bags we keep there. I took one and collected the clothes out of the washing machine, including the hat, gloves, and shoes, and crammed them into the bag. I turned the washing machine back on, poured some bleach in to get out any remaining residue of Peasil, and shut the lid. Then I took the garbage bag into the bedroom, where I added a couple pairs of jeans, half a dozen T-shirts, and everything in my underwear drawer. Very methodical, I opened the drawer in my nightstand where I keep my prescriptions, took the bottle of Tylenol in which I hid my sleeping pills. Carlo didn’t follow me into the bedroom. I didn’t expect him to.

  I came back out and grabbed my car keys and my tote bag, making this as fast as I could for both our sakes. He was collapsed in the recliner where he usually reads, still begging me for something I couldn’t give, a woman I couldn’t be.

  “Please. Tell me,” he said.

  “You know what?” I said, as harshly as I could while my heart got another painful little crick that took some of the harshness out by making me gasp at the same time I spoke. “This isn’t working out for me.”

  I turned away despite the pitiful sound of his whisper that may have been “please don’t leave.”

  And I left. I left.

  Thirty-four

  I should have realized it would happen sooner or later, but I was still surprised that relationships end so fast. You spend more than a year getting to know each other, building trust, and in three minutes it’s over. In my defense, I might have been thinking more clearly if Zach hadn’t just died in my arms. Standing in the laundry room I had been like a boxer still reeling from a jab to the gut, being decked with a sharp right to the jaw immediately after; that one-two punch got me. My mind seemed to slip out repeatedly, have a look at whatever I was doing with a detached interest, and slip back in when it was good and ready. That sensation of draining out of myself.

  I didn’t fully realize my state until I was out of the house and driving south on Oracle, in the left lane, about ten miles under the speed limit. A Chevy flatbed, red and tricked out with all the extras, tailgated me, maybe had been tailgating me for a while without my noticing. When that didn’t make him feel any better, he expressed his concern with his horn. I glanced at my tote bag beside me and considered putting a bullet in his front tire, but decided on restraint instead—besides, there were witnesses. When I got to the stoplight at Tangerine Road I put my car in park, got out, and went to the driver’s window of the truck. It was closed; in thi
s heat windows would always be closed and the AC on full tilt. I hit the tinted window once with the palm of my hand.

  It slid down slowly to reveal a neatly dressed man who should know better than to honk his horn indiscriminately in traffic. He stared at me with apparent alarm.

  I thought it was because he’d never had a woman respond to his honking in quite this way. “Okay, you got my attention. Now what the fuck do you want from me?”

  He looked at my chest, involuntarily raising his hands as if to protect himself. In that moment I saw in his eyes what he saw, a crazed woman wearing a blouse with blood on it. Without saying more he raised his window, backed up, and drove around me. He did not squeal his tires.

  As I watched him pull away, I could feel my heart pumping in my ears and my breath rasping. Road rage that, motherfucker.

  I got back into my car; pulled it off the road to let the rest of the traffic go by; and, taking a whimsical shirt with dancing javelinas from the plastic bag, did a quick change with the top I was wearing. I wadded up the bloody one and shoved it under my seat. Then I pulled into the traffic again and, without being fully aware of where I was going or how I got there, ended up at the Sheraton downtown. Maybe I was flying in the direction of my last simple encounter with someone who knew the real me and wanted that place to run to ground. Upon my arrival at the reception desk I asked if Zach’s room, room 174, was still free.

  Eyeing the garbage bag I held, the girl at the reception desk told me it was. Glad I had had the presence of mind to at least change my shirt, I gave the girl my credit card, got my little plastic swipe key, and scuttled my bag into room 174 before anyone could spot me. I had to get a room somewhere. If I kept driving, I risked killing myself and someone else with my car.