The Last Deep Breath

by Tom Piccirilli

  Grey kept the gun pointed directly at Jericho’s belly.

  “You don’t need that,” Jericho said. “Give it to me.”

  “Eva Rains. Ellie. Where is my sister?”

  “I’ve been waiting for you,” Jericho said. “I’ll take you to her.”

  23

  Maybe one of the bouncers doubled as a chauffeur because Jericho drove his own Mercedes over to a hospital on the Upper West Side. Grey had given him the gun and followed without another word and they’d both kept silent the entire ride uptown. As they pulled in to the medical center Grey swallowed down a groan.

  Pax had been right. Grey had gone about this entire thing backward. He should’ve checked the morgue and the hospitals the day that Ellie sneaked from his bed. But he’d been so blinded with his need to find her that he’d gone out of his way not to discover the truth.

  “Are you Pax or Grey?” Jericho asked.

  “Grey.”

  “She talked a lot about both of you. You’re the one she ran to.”

  Grey said nothing. He thought, What could she have said? She hadn’t seen either of us in more than ten years. Would she just tell the same old stories of the abuse they’d suffered at the hands of the Wagners? He had questions to ask but couldn’t seem to quite form them.

  They parked and walked into the building and Jericho nodded and said hello to a nurse working the front desk. He’d been here plenty of times before. They knew him on sight and gave him sweet smiles.

  Grey followed, the lights of the corridor burning as brightly as the desert sun. He had to shade his eyes.

  When they got to ICU, the antiseptic stink of the place made him gag. He had to stop for a moment.

  “Are you all right?” Jericho asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “You don’t have to go on.”

  “Of course I do.”

  “You look sick. What do you use?”

  “I don’t use, you prick.”

  Jericho tilted his head. “This way.”

  They proceeded up another hall, had to punch in a number on a keypad to get through. Jericho was a trusted visitor. They turned one corner and then another. They passed open rooms where head trauma cases lay in bed with their shattered skulls held in place by enormous iron braces. Grey huffed.

  Finally they arrived at Ellie’s room.

  It reminded Grey of Monty’s office. Glass walls and a huge sliding glass door. Another fish bowl where every passing stranger could look in on the dying.

  Ellie was hooked up to fifty-thousand watts of machinery. A ventilator had been attached to a tube in her throat and every few seconds it would force air into her lungs and make her body jerk and sway. As if she were lying at the edge of a lake and wind-blown waves pushed and pulled at her body.

  Grey sat in the visitor’s chair at the side of the bed and took her hand. It was cold and so pale that he could see the veins working beneath her skin. She’d lost a lot of weight in the last three months. He spoke her name or thought he did. Her eyes were half-open and empty. He put her palm to his mouth and spoke against her flesh. He wasn’t aware of his own words and he couldn’t stop himself. He didn’t recognize his own voice and was almost lulled by the rhythmic murmur of it, like a hymn or a prayer.

  He thought about her hugging her dog in the corner of the Wagners’ kitchen while Pax beat the hell out of the old man. He thought of her telling the DA to get fucked. So many machines were attached to her that he could barely see her body beneath the tubes and wires. The ventilator breathed her breaths for her with hideous regularity. His breathing soon fell into the same mechanical cadence.

  “What happened to her?” he asked. “Was it peritonitis?”

  “What?” Jericho said. “Oh, you mean from the knife wound. No, not peritonitis.”

  “Then what? Overdose?”

  “Yes.”

  “On your product.”

  “Yes.”

  No guilt. No oh my God I am heartily sorry. No I’ve devoted my life to saving children from the evils of drugs.

  “Tell me what happened.”

  Jericho took a deep breath, nearly a yawn, like he was already bored. “She and her manager started off as customers of mine. Good people. We spent a lot of time together. I own a small movie outfit. Erotic thrillers. Soft-core. I wanted her to star in our next feature. I fell in love with her.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “Why, you think it can’t happen?” Jericho seemed genuinely offended. “You think a man like me can’t fall in love?” Grey simply stared at him, realizing it was impossible to guess at the complexities and stupidities of a pimp in silk. “But her habit kept growing.”

  “And you kept feeding it.”

  “She and Raymond...he’s the manager...”

  “I know.”

  “...they planned on ripping me off. Botched the job, killed one of my low-level dealers, just a kid really—”

  “No...”

  “And she was stabbed by the kid, who was only defending himself, even as he was dying with a bullet in his heart. Raymond left her on the street. It was all out in the open, not very well-planned. She ran from me. She shouldn’t have run. I never would have hurt her. I didn’t care about the money or the product. I only wanted what was best for her. I would have done anything for her. I wanted to marry her.”

  “You’re the one who sold her the heroin,” Grey said.

  “I didn’t sell it to her. I gave it to her. What else was I supposed to do? She’s a junkie. But I still loved her.”

  Look at how large and in charge. Look at how he ruled the world. Look at how he had no fear, talking about his drug deals and murder right out in the open, where any doctor or grieving relative could overhear him. But Jericho felt shielded, immune, impervious.

  “You could’ve helped her.”

  “Did you? Did you try?”

  Grey hadn’t. He could’ve thrown away the H he’d found in her purse but he hadn’t thrown it away.

  “She said it wasn’t John’s fault.”

  “He talked her into trying to rip me off.”

  “How do you know?” Grey asked. “How do you know it wasn’t the other way around?”

  Jericho ignored him. “Raymond grabbed the cash and the heroin and went back to his apartment. He’d cooked his load and was nodding. He was new to the needle. He still didn’t know how to ride his high. He actually opened the door when I knocked.”

  Of course he was new to it. Ellie got him hooked. Like Harvey had said, shooting up wasn’t a righteous high. It kills everything. Raymond took a chance on her in L.A. and tried to give her a second chance, and she dragged him down with her on the streets of New York.

  “What did you do to him?”

  Jericho tsked. “What do you think?

  Grey shut his eyes and felt Ellie’s body heave and bounce, the vibrations working through him until it felt like he was in bed with her, moving along in the same measured tempo. He imagined this is what it would be like to make love with her, their lips sealed together, breathing the same breaths.

  His voice was hoarse and rasping. He looked up and said, “She was a junkie porn actress who tried to rip you off, and you loved her.”

  “We don’t choose who to love, now do we?”

  No, we don’t, Grey agreed. “Is there any chance for her?”

  “No. She’s brain dead.”

  “Then why keep her—”

  “I can’t let her go,” Jericho whispered.

  His words were nearly drowned out by the machinery, the hiss and hum and drone of the ventilator.

  Grey hadn’t saved her. Perhaps he hadn’t even wanted to. He should’ve forced her to go to a hospital, where they could have treated her for addiction, where they could have brought the psychiatrists over from the mental wing and she could have talked to someone the way she had never talked to him. It’s what Pax would have done. Pax would have made the effort to protect their sister if he wasn’t already busy protecting America.<
br />
  A kind of wild keening started to rise in the room but it abruptly stopped. Grey looked to see if it was Ellie. But she was still asleep, still as dead as she could be. His gaze shifted to Jericho and he saw the slick silk god of the sewer staring at him in sympathy. Pax wouldn’t let this go on.

  For once, Grey would do the right thing.

  “I’m turning it off,” he said.

  Jericho shook his head. “You have no right.”

  “I’m her brother.”

  “You’re not even blood-related.”

  “She wouldn’t want this.”

  “You don’t even know her.”

  “I know enough. I know she wouldn’t want to be like this.”

  “You have no say in the matter.”

  “Tell her goodbye.”

  “I won’t.”

  The equipment was insane. It kept whirring and beeping, the endless switches snapping on and off, circuits opening and closing. Grey kissed Ellie’s forehead and said, “Goodbye.” He found a huge wire and followed it to the plug and pulled. It didn’t come loose easily. He grunted and growled and put his back into it. Jericho snarled, “Stop.” With a shower of sparks the wire came free from the wall. An alarm began to sound. Ellie’s body thrashed as the ventilator stopped functioning. Jericho whispered, “No no...” and rushed forward, got his arms around Grey and started to wrestle with him. Grey shoved him off and watched, as if from a great distance, as Jericho reached for the .38 he’d pocketed and began to withdraw it. That same sense of vertigo assailed Grey, made his head spin even while his body performed almost without his awareness. He gripped Jericho’s wrist and squeezed until the tiny bones ground together. The gun smacked the floor with a hard metallic ringing that went on and on like the toll of a bell. Grey slipped the wire around Jericho’s neck and tightened it, his muscles straining as Jericho wheezed. He pulled him into the corner closest to the door just as the doctors and nurses burst in and descended onto Ellie’s body like wasps. No one looked to the left to see him and Jericho there. He tightened his grip further as Jericho’s legs went out from under him. The doctors disconnected the ventilator from the tube in Ellie’s throat and connected a plastic pump they used to manually squeeze air into her lungs. Grey wanted to tell them to stop but he was gasping exactly as her body was. He felt his own lungs bursting just as Jericho’s were. Ellie made a nearly human sound, the kind an upset child might make. She took one last deep breath and so did Grey. He thought he would never get enough air from now on, not for the rest of his life. Her body relaxed as Jericho’s did in Grey’s arms. Still unseen, he lowered Jericho to the floor and stepped out the door. He drifted through the halls and somehow wound up in the emergency room, where he sat among the forgotten, the bleeding, the diseased, the discarded, and the damned. Their moans and sobs and feverish chatter comforted him. He heard his mother tell his father, Slow down, Eddie, the roads are icy. He turned his face to the wall and sucked air like a fish washed up on the sandy shore. The cops would be here soon. He shut his eyes and thought of himself in prison for the rest of his days. He thought of himself hailed as the most natural actor since Brando. He and Kendra and Pax sipped champagne at the premiere. He bought a house in Beverly Hills but tore down the wall out front. Let them all in, let them all see. When the police finally showed up they broke past on the run and disappeared down the hall. Grey rose like an abandoned child new to the world, walked out onto the streets of the city, lost himself in the wind and the shadows, killing even more time, and waited for the next thing to happen.