Rage Against the Dying

by Becky Masterman

  He moved toward the homeless man, grunted with the effort of trying to drag a body weighing in the neighborhood of two hundred and fifty pounds. It didn’t budge on his first try.

  “Want some help?” I asked.

  “Didn’t the profile of me tell you I’m not an idiot?”

  “You’ve got a lot of bodies to move. You’re running out of time. You’re going to have to cut this tape off me anyway before you leave so they don’t find it on my body. You still have the gun.”

  It was fairly convincing. You lie really well when you think you’re about to die. Trusting in his own brawn and the weapon he grabbed an X-Acto knife out of the pencil cup on the desk and sliced through the tape on my wrists and ankles, knicking me a couple times in the process. He put the knife back on the desk. “You get the heavier end so I can hold on to the gun,” he said.

  “I don’t think I can lift that end,” I said.

  “The hell you can’t,” he said. “I’ve been watching you.”

  I stood up and moved behind Emery’s double, grasping him under the armpits while Emery hooked an arm around his legs. I lifted, then dropped him, which distracted Emery for a moment.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  Emery glanced over at Coleman. “No delaying tactics or I’ll staple the agent’s other ear.”

  We both went at it again, half moving, half dragging the corpse toward the kitchen, where the focus of the explosion would be. Only now, thanks to the distraction when I dropped the body, I had the knife tucked into my jeans and covered with the edge of my shirt.

  We moved into the kitchen, where lined up on a stainless-steel counter were six liter-size bottles of alcohol, a twisted rag protruding out the top of each. Now I knew where the smell of gasoline was coming from. He handed me one of the homemade bombs and directed me.

  “Slide it under his throat so it destroys his face,” Emery said.

  I got down on my knees and did so. I tried to stand, but my back suddenly cramped and I gasped with the spasm. This was not a good omen for my getting us out of this scrape.

  Emery looked around at the bodies. “Five within twenty-four hours. To think I used to make elaborate plans to do one woman once a year.” He shook his head, seemingly embarrassed at the mess he had made.

  Still on my knees, I made my plan. Emery was taller than I, so an underhanded slash across his stomach with the knife would surprise him, and then a quick jab to his right temple would finish him off. The biggest problem was my back. The move was fairly simple, but I did not know how the hell I was going to be able to get up off the floor to accomplish it. I could only hope that the adrenaline building in my system would do its job.

  Emery walked over to the counter by the sink where the rest of the Molotov cocktails waited in bottles of Bombay gin, Grey Goose vodka, and Crown Royal. Top-shelf explosives. They had longer strips of cloth than others I’d seen, and these were all connected by a single strip, presumably so he would be able to place them distant from one another, have enough time to light all four, and dash out the back door before the place blew. “I definitely have to place one of these by the agent’s feet,” he said. “I don’t want them to see that her tendons were cut.”

  “Was it vodka?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “In Lynch’s IV bag.”

  He put my gun down on the counter and picked up the bottle of Grey Goose. “I figured with all the pain killers he was on, a liter of alcohol going straight to his brain would finish him off but allow me plenty of time to get away from the hospital. How did you know?”

  I started to tell him I saw him posing as nurse with the half-empty IV bag and how the alcohol stung going into Lynch’s hand, but Emery wasn’t interested. Still thinking, his eyes drifted off to the primitive IED in his hand and I could imagine him imagining what it would all look like, the sequence in which he would light the fuses before he bolted. He was close enough to me, and I now had my fingers wrapped around the front of my shirt that covered the knife, carefully up on one foot, keeping my abdominal muscles tight and my spine as rigid as possible while prepared for the pain when I leaped on him for our one chance at survival. I just needed to get him to come a little closer, but he backed up instead,

  “Brigid Quinn,” he said, “I saw you take the knife. Did you think I would let you get close enough to use it?”

  We were very still then, he standing about six feet away and able to move quickly, and I on my knees before him. I was out of options and wondered how it would feel to die. We watched one another for a moment, guessing each other’s next move, and then were both distracted by the soft but unmistakable sound of a shotgun shell being racked.

  Cha-chin.

  It came from the direction of the doorway between the kitchen and the bar. Emery’s back was to the door and from my position on the floor I could just make out the gun in Coleman’s hands though I couldn’t see her body.

  “Don’t!” I shouted, because even in that second I knew what would come of it.

  Emery tried to turn but didn’t make it halfway before the roar of the shotgun blast, a surprised look, and the front of his belly blew over me.

  Emery was a large man. He didn’t immediately fall, but looked at me, then looked at his midsection, from which the blood started gushing. He was even able to stumble a step and reach out to me before toppling to his knees and falling flat out with his face turned partly in my direction, resting in his own body fluids.

  Just to be on the safe side I dropped, too, so my face was about ten inches from Emery’s. I could tell he was still alive.

  I could see that the bowl of his pipe was close to his lips. He must have fallen on it and jammed the pipe stem into his throat. That was only insult. The shotgun blast was injury enough. He was coughing up blood around the pipe, and I knew I should move before the trickle reached me. He tried to suck in air as if he wanted to say something, but, besides the pipe in his throat, the shot might have shaved off the bottom of his lungs and that would make talking hard.

  “Damn it, Emery, I wish I could have killed you myself,” I whispered, staring into his left eye, the one that was turned toward me.

  A little more blood burbled from his lips. His fingers scrabbled a bit on the linoleum. But I could see consciousness fading from that one eye. I wished there was an afterlife so I could kill him forever.

  Then he was dead. I could say the dying didn’t take nearly long enough or entail enough pain, but you have to keep a positive attitude. I raised myself up and looked over the top of his bulk. I saw Coleman on the floor behind him, lying on her back, holding her arms rigid so that the barrel of the gun was parallel with her body, its muzzle still trained in my direction. I fell on my back then, so all of us, the dead and alive, were down, all but Emery staring at the fluorescent lights on the ceiling.

  “Laura!” I yelled, rocking back and forth in my anger and frustration. “You idiot. You had to go shoot him in the back when he wasn’t armed.”

  Coleman had managed to pull the packing tape from her mouth before crawling into the kitchen and now lay chattering things like, “You fuckin’ die. You. Die. You fuck.”

  I don’t know how long she would have gone on like that, but, “Laura, he’s dead,” I whispered as gently as I could, while hoping her hysteria didn’t tend toward chambering another shell and firing indiscriminately. “He can’t get any more dead.”

  She quieted, sobbed into herself, but seemed unwilling or unable to lower the gun.

  “Can you point that thing somewhere else?” I said. She didn’t respond either in word or deed, so I rolled over, crawled out of the line of fire, and hoisted myself to my feet. I went over to her. Her arms were still locked in the same position from which she had fired the gun. I took the gun from her, threw on the safety, and leaned it against the doorway. Then I gently lowered her arms to her sides. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Thanks. But I was going to take care of him.”

  She continued to cry, started to shake, then
managed to get out through chattering teeth, “Bullshit. I saved your fuckin’ life.”

  “Shh,” I said. “Okay, you’re right. You saved my fuckin’ life. Are you stable?” She shook her head no, then yes.

  “We’re not done here,” I said.

  Then, Max.

  Max. I stepped over Coleman’s body and ran into the front of the bar and knelt beside him, where he lay on his back. There was blood on his chest and pooling underneath him where the gunshot had knocked him backward onto the table and then to the floor. I pressed a finger to the side of his neck, though I didn’t expect to feel a pulse. Nobody survives a .45 center-mass shot even without the double tap.

  In the space of time that I felt for his pulse, I remembered everything I knew about Max. Poker player, philosopher, Native American, lawman, husband, enemy, friend. I never thought that at their death another person’s life could flash before your own eyes. I wanted to cry at the thought that there wasn’t nearly enough of it, and I knew very little of what there was. But no time now. Later, after I had seen to Laura Coleman, there would be more time than I wanted to think about Emery’s last victim.

  I took a second to rip the plug of the jukebox out of the wall. Then I used the phone in Emery’s office to call 911.

  “Officers down,” I said, and gave them the location. I didn’t bother describing the exact situation. It would have taken too long and they would discover soon enough.

  I made a quick assessment and knelt down again next to Coleman. “Okay, I think we’ve got the facts now. I need to get you away from this part of the scene. Roll over on your side so your ankles don’t drag.”

  “I don’t understand,” she moaned.

  “I’ll explain in a minute.”

  Confused but obedient, Coleman rolled over. I lifted her by the knees to avoid as much pressure on her ankles as possible, while she inched forward on her elbow into the restaurant area, where I propped her head on a stack of paper napkins I got from the bar. I tried to put her far from where Max’s body lay in front of the bar, but the place isn’t that big. Coleman turned her head to look between the legs of the chairs at him and wiped the back of her hand over her eyes.

  “You just rest there a minute while I finish staging a scene,” I said.

  My back starting to spasm, making me move like Jed Clampett on speed, I went into the office, dabbled my fingers in Cheri’s blood, then went to the kitchen and picked up the shotgun to cover any other fingerprints with my freshly bloody ones to leave no doubt as to who fired the gun. With a towel I wiped off the 1911 that Emery had used on Max, making sure there were none of my prints on it. Then I pressed his fingers against it before resting it next to his right hand.

  I knew it wasted a second, but I kicked the man who killed Jessica. I kicked him in the head. It didn’t make me feel any better, but then nothing ever would.

  I went back into the bar and, mindless of the remaining blood on my hands, got down two glasses, opened the bottle of Tarantula Tequila. I poured a couple of healthy slugs, knocked back mine, then went back and sat down next to Coleman, noting from the alarmed look on her face that she had come out of her drugged state and just noticed I was covered with gore.

  “Here, drink this.” I raised her head and forced down as much of the tequila as she would take to stave off the shock. “We’ve got less than two minutes to talk fast before this place is all sirens and flashing lights and shit, and here’s how it’s going to play out. I killed Emery. You didn’t see it happen because you were out here trying to crawl for help.”

  “Why would you do that?” she asked.

  “We can go over the whys later. Just listen.”

  Coleman’s head rocked back and forth on the pile of napkins. “Emery was a serial killer. They won’t do anything to me.”

  “Yes they will,” I said. “I know you’re half in shock and you can’t see the way things will play out. But I can, so you have to listen very carefully. You shot an unarmed man in the back, Snow. It was a righteous kill, but you did it while investigating a case after you were taken off. Second: because no one paid attention to your suspicions of Lynch, Max Coyote is dead. The Tucson Bureau made a royal mess of this case and Special Agent in Charge Roger Morrison is going to be looking for a fall guy to deflect attention from himself so he doesn’t look responsible. You’ll be that guy.”

  “I don’t care anymore.”

  “So what are you going to do, teach high school or do security for some corporation? Coleman, sweetheart, you’re one of the good guys. You need to do this.”

  I could hear the sirens now. “Don’t think I’m going altruistic or noble, Coleman. My life is already in ruins and this won’t make it any worse. I just don’t want to give Morrison the satisfaction of drumming you out of the Bureau.”

  “I’m going to tell them the truth.”

  “No you’re not, because you can’t do anything but crawl, which means I’ll be out the door first. I’m going to tell them what happened, and if you give them a different story after, they’ll get me for obstruction of justice and I’ll go to prison. I’m putting myself into the perfect lose-lose situation, my dear, so you have no option but to win.”

  “You can’t do this.”

  We were running out of time. “Oh yes I can. As an added incentive to you, I’ll also tell them you fucked Royal Hughes.”

  There went the flashing colored lights through the high windows near the ceiling.

  But before facing the SWAT team, I had to spend two more seconds on one more thing. I quickly went into Emery’s office and picked up the jar of pickled pigs’ feet from his desk. There was that little cream-colored edge pressed up against the glass on the inside that I had seen while sitting at the bar, a form and color that almost jibed with the rest of the contents. What I had thought was another instance of my bizarre imaginings.

  A voice on a megaphone said, “You are surrounded. Come out slowly with your hands up.”

  I brought the jar of pigs’ feet back into the bar, raised it well over my head, shut my eyes, and threw it so that its side hit the cash register. It shattered beautifully, with most of the shards falling behind the bar, the pungent vinegar odor meeting me as I climbed up on one of the stools to peer at my handiwork and see that I’d been right about what had been displayed there all these years.

  Six well-preserved human ears.

  I grabbed a handful of the white paper napkins and went to the front door, carefully opened it, sticking the napkins out first. When I opened it wide I saw the array of squad cars, everything from Tucson Police to Arizona State Highway Patrol. Interspersed among the cars were the SWAT guys, rifles up and ready. Some last little spurt of adrenaline I didn’t know I had left kicked up when I stared into a half-dozen expert muzzles and another less-than-expert couple dozen I thought could go off accidentally at any moment. The faces reminded me what I looked like at this moment, unrecognizable.

  “Brigid Quinn, FBI,” I shouted, hands in the air and moving forward slowly. “Two downed officers inside. Hurry.”

  Fifty-two

  Coleman had tried her best to act tough, but was too much in shock to speak much, which was just as well. I spent some hours with the investigators and, to give the devil his due, with Roger Morrison, who showed up and played nice with both the metro cops and the sheriff’s deputies. I agreed to come in on Monday for interviews with the officer-involved-shooting folks, though it was going to be a little dicey given the fact I was decommissioned.

  But before any of the conversation, Coleman and Max were both brought out on stretchers. Both on oxygen. Good lord.

  “Max?” I asked. “He didn’t have a pulse.”

  The paramedic nodded. “Slight. He’s barely stable. But alive.”

  There’s that nightmare where you’ve accidentally killed someone. You can’t bring them back to life and you know you’re going to have to spend the rest of your life with that on your conscience. Then you wake up and you realize they’re alive after
all.

  And they’re probably going to send your ass to jail. My sense of euphoria upon hearing that Max was alive was only slightly tempered by that realization. Probably later I would care more about going to prison for Peasil’s death and the subsequent cover-up, but in that moment I was one hundred percent glad that at least I had finally stopped the dying.

  I went back to my conversation with Morrison, and when I finally thought to look at my watch I saw the time matched the darkness I was just beginning to notice. The paramedics urged me to get into the other ambulance for a ride to the hospital, but I only wanted to get back to Coleman’s place. Just when I thought it was all over but the shouting, I spotted Carlo’s Volvo parked well beyond the crime scene tape, lights off, his face leaning forward and peering intently through the windshield as if he was trying to watch a drive-in movie in the rain.

  Despite having his hands full with keeping the media away from the scene, Morrison must have been keeping a close eye on me. “Are you okay?” he asked, probably meaning whether any of the carnage covering my body was my own.

  I nodded without looking away from Carlo.

  “Your husband,” he said. “I met him when he arrived and told him he could stay as long as he didn’t get out of the car.”

  “Do you remember when that was?”

  “Yes,” Three-Piece said. Before answering further he took uncustomarily harsh care of a pushy reporter. “Sir! Please remove your fucking camera from the agent’s face. She’s not going to say anything. Get this man out of here.” He gestured to a nearby patrolman to escort the reporter out of the scene. Then he looked at his watch. “It was about three hours ago.”

  “He’s been sitting there for three hours? Just sitting there? How did he know I was here?”

  Morrison shrugged, having spent his supply of nice guy. “How the fuck should I know?” he snapped. “I’ve been a little busy.” Then, possibly recalling I’d been a little busy myself, he said, “I called him. You should go now,” Morrison said, sounding like letting me go was against his better judgment.