Lethal Injection

by Jim Nisbet

  Colleen smacked her lips. “Later Eddie,” she said impatiently. “Let’s get off.”

  Royce wrapped Eddie’s thin bicep with the surgical tubing. “Make a fist.”

  “Make a fist,” Eddie mocked him. But he sat back against the wall at the head of the bed with his arm alongside his thigh and made a fist. The outsized black widow tattooed along Eddie’s forearm undulated over his musculature. Royce felt the inside of the elbow. The veins would be calloused from years of abuse, but Royce had taken blood samples from dozens of convicts with similar problems. He skillfully found a pulsing vein and rolled it beneath his thumb. He passed the alcohol swab over the area. Eddie’s flesh was a pale ochre beneath the tattoos; it reacted slowly to Royce’s touch, like soft wax.

  Royce looked up. Eddie’s eyes were fixed on the injection site with a fascinated stare. There was a slight yellowish tinge to their whites.

  Hepatitis, Royce thought. Remind me to wash my hands.

  “Ready, Eddie?”

  Eddie looked Royce in the eye and sneered. “What do you mean, ‘ready’?”

  Exactly what Bobby Mencken had said. This almost unnerved Royce, but he kept his gaze steady. He could feel Eddie’s pulse beneath the tip of his thumb. In his right hand, held the way a Frenchman holds his cigarette, Royce held the thin hypodermic that would turn Eddie to dust.

  There is always the question, Royce thought, of how little or how much a man shooting dope hates himself.

  “I know you’re ready, Eddie,” he said gently. “It’s just habit, I guess. Like the lollipop and the smile.” There was indeed an odd ghost of guileless habit in this deadly tableau, as Royce smiled his most natural bedside smile.

  Eddie’s sneer curled into a snarl. “Fuck your lollipop and your smile,” he said.

  Royce stiffened. His smile faded.

  Colleen whined. “Eddie…”

  Royce looked down at Eddie’s arm. The gleaming tip of the needle lay against the unpunctured skin. The veins were beginning to swell from the tourniquet above. How to handle this? Royce straightened up.

  “Maybe you don’t like morphine,” he said. His smile had become a thin line on his face. “Maybe I should just throw the hit out the window here. What would be the difference?”

  Eddie stared rigidly at Royce. A wet line of perspiration glistened at his temple.

  “He’s just like that, Royce,” Colleen said in a plaintive voice. “He likes to upset people; it’s automatic with him. He sees you smile, it makes him unhappy. When you’re unhappy, he’s smiling. Quite a gig, huh? Not much, a little obvious, but it’s his. And he’s uptight about something. Come on, Eddie,” she said tenderly, smoothing his hair, touching his arm, “get off and relax. You don’t have to tell us where you’ve been….”

  Eddie stared at Royce. Then he blinked. “Yeah,” he said suddenly. He exhaled, two short puffs. “Yeah.” He sighed and relaxed slightly against the wall. “Yeah…”

  Colleen looked at Royce and nodded toward the syringe. “Must have been rough,” she said soothingly, touching Eddie’s brow at the hairline. “Shooting that woman in the—” She stopped abruptly. “You know.”

  Eddie glanced at her. “Yeah,” he said, looking away. “I know all about it.” He worried the corner of his mouth with the tip of his tongue and watched Royce cleanly hit the side of the vein and lever the length of the needle in, an arrow toward the heart. Nice work. Eddie’s blood flowered into the syringe and Royce loosened the surgical tubing. “So you’re a friend of Bobby Mink’s,” Eddie said. “He ever mention me?”

  Royce nodded as the plunger bottomed into the syringe. “Yeah,” he said, withdrawing the needle from the puncture. “A good friend.” He placed the cotton swab over the drop of blood that appeared there and looked up. Eddie’s jaw had begun to sag and his lips were going slack. A tiny frown was beginning to invent itself in the creases around his eyes. “He told me that if I ever did run into to you, I was to give you this,” Royce said.

  He leaned forward and kissed Eddie on the mouth.

  “Bobby. . . ?” Eddie whispered. “I didn’t…” His face began to slowly oscillate between the frown and a blank. Colleen sat back on her heels and continued to stroke his brow. Eddie tried to breath deeply once and almost got it in. But he was suffering from pulmonary arrest; his mechanism for processing air was collapsing. The second breath was abrupt and incomplete. Eddie opened his mouth and tried to yawn but couldn’t. He relaxed against the wall at the head of the bed, much as he had been for the past hour, and died with his eyes open.

  SIXTEEN

  “ Oh, Eddie,” Colleen said, looking sadly at the dead man, stroking his short hair. “Eddie, Eddie, Eddie.”

  Royce put the spent syringe on the windowsill with the two others. His hands were shaking, and sweat ran down his naked ribs from both armpits. He pushed the dead man’s legs out of the way and sat heavily on the edge of the bed. A spring cracked musically beneath the mattress. The damp, wrinkled sheets had a gritty feeling to them. No air moved through the open window. From beyond the back steps and clotheslines of the buildings this window looked out on, he heard the emphatic beat of a radio in a passing car. Somewhere somebody was stacking dishes and flatware. He looked at Eddie. Eddie stared sightlessly at him.

  “Eddie, Eddie, Eddie,” he said softly. He looked at Colleen Valdez. “How did you know?”

  She ignored the question. She reached out and tentatively touched Eddie’s hair, then withdrew the hand.

  Royce dully watched her breasts. Now what, he wondered. He felt annoyed. And now, what not? After all, he’d just killed a man. That’s what he’d come here to do, wasn’t it? Well, no, not really. He’d come here to find out who framed Bobby Mencken. And he found out. Eddie had framed Bobby Mencken. He looked at Colleen. “How did you know, Colleen?” he said again. “You knew I was going to kill Eddie.”

  She continued to look at Eddie and make gentle, meaningless motions with her hands, reaching out to touch him, withdrawing the hand, reaching out again and tentatively touching him.

  “You’re stroking a corpse,” Royce said cruelly.

  She shot him a fierce glance. “And who the fuck are you?” she hissed.

  He looked at her. She looked at him. Her look wavered. “Am I next?” she said.

  “What?” he asked, incredulous. “You? No, never, no way.”

  She sat primly, for a naked woman, looking straight ahead at Eddie, and said, “That may be so. Anyway, I knew him for a long time. We were friends.”

  “He wasn’t Bobby’s friend,” Royce argued. “I saw Bobby die and—” He stopped himself. Yes, Dr. Royce?

  She continued to look at Eddie.

  “And Eddie framed him,” Royce blundered onward. “You told me so yourself.”

  “Eddie took care of me,” she said quietly.

  “So can I. Better care.”

  “He could play the guitar,” she said tearfully.

  “He was a scumbag,” Royce growled. “Jesus Christ. You loved Bobby Mencken, remember? The man kissed me when he died!” Royce no longer cared about the continuity of his story. To hell with continuity. “I didn’t hardly even know the guy and I could see he was innocent! Anybody could see it! I had to do something about it. So there he is.” Royce shook a finger at Eddie. “There’s the guy who killed Bobby Mencken. You loved Bobby. I could have loved Bobby. I mean, he was my friend. The guy who as good as murdered him is dead. It’s called revenge! Ain’t it jut ducky?”

  Royce was shouting. He suddenly became aware that this was no ordinary domestic argument, such as he might have had with Pamela. He was naked, shouting over the naked corpse of a man he’d just murdered, at a naked female junkie, in a squalid Dallas tenement with lots of syringes and morphine and neighbors lying around. He looked at the open window and wondered if anyone could hear or understand him. He cursed under his breath and ground his teeth. They were going to have to do something with the body. He stood and looked out the window. Three stories below, in th
e darkness among several garbage cans, he could see the remains of the television set Eddie had thrown over the stairwell banister three days before. Around the narrow courtyard stood several buildings, some of them taller than the one he was standing in, with maybe fifty or sixty windows looking out on it. No good. They weren’t going to be able to just throw Eddie out the window and go on living the simple life. It was going to take some work. He looked up. The lights of a few stars had managed to penetrate the glare of the huge city below them. Even so, it looked mighty clean up there. Did the stars know how dirty it was down here? Is that why they’re so far away?

  He pulled his head back in the window and thought about it. They were going to have to take that filthy living room rug out to get cleaned with Eddie rolled up in it. He looked beyond the bed at the rug in the living room, below the blue light of the television. Even from where he stood it was obvious that it was going to be hard to convince anybody that rug was worth doing anything to other than throwing it out. So O.K., that was it. They were going to take the rug to the dump and come home with a new one.

  Of course, in this neighborhood, someone would come up to them and say, what you throwing away a perfectly good rug for? Eight Ball, maybe it would be Eight Ball. Give it here, he’d say. I’ll take it home right now, be good for the baby to play on.

  So there Royce and Colleen would be in the street, sweating under the dead weight of Eddie and the rug, trying to keep moving toward the pickup, trying to explain to Eight Ball or whoever that the rug had been quarantined and condemned and had to get incinerated by the government, no ifs, ands or buts; they were waiting at the dump for it now.

  Maybe if they waited a couple of days for Friday night. Everybody would be too busy getting liquored up to worry about an old rug. But this was a hell of a climate to be leaving corpses lying around in.

  He came wearily around to the other side of the bed. “Look, Colleen,” he said patiently, quietly this time. She ignored him. He saw the whiskey bottle on the floor by the wooden keg. An amber buoy in a gray sea. That was what he needed. He picked it up and had a drink and lay down on the bed next to her.

  Still she watched Eddie. Royce looked beyond her, at Eddie. His eyes were still open and so was his mouth, a fleck of foam at the corner of it. His tongue hadn’t yet begun to push up behind his teeth, but it would soon enough. The tattoos blotched his arms, his head and neck, his shoulders. He was very pale beneath the blue checked shirt.

  “Now we can call him Past Eddie,” Royce said slowly. He took a drink.

  A smile flicked over her mouth and she shook it off. Royce looked at her. Although she smiled infrequently, it was very becoming when she did. In the half-light of the bedroom the pockmarks on her face looked two-dimensional, like freckles. Her dark shoulder peeked out of the mantle of her long hair like a rock in a black river. The crease where her belly met her thigh reminded him of the rounded hills of California. The toes clustered beneath her behind looked like water-rounded pebbles at the base of a smooth stone.

  He drank again. He could get used to this geology. To hell with Eddie.

  He reached to touch her. She slipped off the bed and left the room.

  Royce lay back against the wall and sipped the whiskey. She’d get used to it. She had to. A woman can’t make it without help. It’s a man’s world out there, and that wasn’t just his opinion. Lots of people said so. He’d help Colleen, though. He’d be her man. She’d be fine with him. He could set up a little practice in some border town somewhere, way out beyond Del Rio maybe, in Big Bend country. They could live up in the mountains, keep a little ranch with some brood stock on it. Sell a few horses, deliver a few babies, maintain a couple of sensible morphine habits.

  He heard her walking over the empty potato-chip bags in the other room.

  Funny how that stuff makes you itch. And scratching doesn’t do you any good. He idly scratched the length of his forearm against the label of the whiskey bottle. His hands had stopped shaking, and he was sweating normally, like any man in summer in Texas. How quickly the system adapts to outrage. Murder and dope. Franklin Royce was a new man. He noticed the whiskey took the edge off his desire for the morphine but didn’t really quench it. No wonder addicts wandered between junk addiction and alcohol addiction and back.

  Well, that wouldn’t be a problem for him and Colleen. Pharmaceutical morphine is not very expensive when you have a license to buy it. The trick is not to get too strung out, not to get to where you can’t maintain a semblance of normal life. Keep on eating, drinking, working and keeping the dosage light. Temperance in all things. That’s the key.

  He heard the toilet flush in the far end of the apartment.

  Plumbing, he thought. Like any woman, she’ll be wanting plumbing. So we can’t get too far up in the mountains. Trip to El Paso once in a while; get a pair of fancy boots. Would she be good with the horses? Women usually are, if they get on with them at all. But first what we have to do is figure out how to get rid of Past Eddie, and we’re free to go. Poor old Past Eddie. He turned and looked at the corpse, to his right across the bed. The corpse stared back at the bottle. Poor old Past Eddie, my ass. Got just what he deserved. Shooting women in the face. Framing his best friend. Well, Eddie, how do you like the swift retribution, huh? A real eye-opener, eh?

  Just then Colleen Valdez came back into the bedroom. She was wearing the saffron taffeta housecoat he’d first met her in, unsecured in front, and she was carrying Eddie’s guitar. Without a word to Royce, she went to the other side of the bed and placed the guitar in the dead man’s lap and rested the peghead over his shoulder against the wall. She stepped back and regarded the effect of this for a moment, giving Royce a chance once again to admire her charms. Never would he tire of looking at her. After a moment Colleen stepped forward to make an adjustment. She wrapped Eddie’s blue checked arm over the guitar. The strings twanged and damped as she stepped back again.

  “He always loved his guitar,” she said, apparently satisfied with the mordant tableau. “He once told me he wanted to be buried with it. In case they had taverns in hell, he said, he could always play for drinks. Now.” She turned to the window and turned back, holding up a syringe in each hand. She looked at Royce. “This has all been a great strain on me. May I trouble you for an injection, Doctor?”

  Royce brightened, like a naughty little boy once again back in the good graces of his mother. He set the bottle on the floor next to the bed and held out his hand for the tools of his trade. Colleen stepped over Eddie’s inert legs onto the bed, and stood over Royce.

  “Do both of us, Royce,” she said, looking down at him from the high shadows of her hair. In the orange and black she looked like a storm sunset. Then she dropped the housecoat. “Afterwards, I’ll do both of us,” she whispered.

  He smiled up at her. “I’d be happy to oblige, and to be obliged, ma’am.”

  She knelt beside him and handed him a syringe. He took her left arm. “Alcohol,” he said.

  “Fuck the alcohol,” she said huskily, and ran her free hand along his leg.

  “Don’t fuck the alcohol; fuck the alcoholic,” Royce chided her. He picked up the bottle, took a slug of whiskey into his mouth and held it there. Then he kissed and licked the inside of her elbow. She giggled. “That’ll clean it off,” he said with gallant authority. He swabbed her arm with the whiskey and tied it off. He carefully chose a spot with the thin, short diabetic needle and hit her cleanly among the small red dots already on her arm. She sighed and sat back on her heels. She removed the tubing herself as he pressed the plunger home and withdrew the point. Royce dropped the spent hypodermic to the floor and picked up the whiskey bottle. He drank, then inverted the bottle on his thumb. She licked her finger and dabbed at the spot of blood on her arm.

  “God, you’re good at that, Royce,” she said breathily. “It’s the one aspect of the whole tour I’ve never really liked, shooting myself up. But you make it… easy….”

  “Force of habit,” he expla
ined sheepishly, as he dabbed whiskey on the inside of his forearm over a prominent vein. “Like hygiene.”

  “Hi, Gene.” She stroked him dreamily. “I don’t mind a habit or two,” she said, as she lovingly tied an overhand knot in the surgical tubing, around his arm below the bicep. “It’s people messing with my life I don’t like.”

  He held the syringe upside down and tapped it to get the air to the tip of the needle. Then he gently depressed the plunger until a droplet appeared at its tip. “That’s all over now, baby.” He winced as he punctured his skin and the wall of the vein and slid the needle into his forearm. It always felt like a train entering a tunnel to him. “I was thinking,” he said, as a thin red feather of his blood appeared in the syringe, “once we get rid of Eddie there’ll be no reason to stick around here…. Hey, you know?” He looked up at her. She was watching the needle at his arm. “I was wondering.”

  “About what?” she said softly, releasing the knot.

  “Oh,” Royce said, as he looked down again at his work and began to depress the plunger. “How come Eddie never snake-bit you, like he did Bobby and me and I guess everybody else he wanted to push around?” The plunger eased down.

  “Maybe he thought I’d been snake-bit enough,” she said thoughtfully. She touched two fingertips to the twin burns on Royce’s neck.

  He slipped the needle from his arm and smiled up at her. “Oh?” he said lazily. The angle of her face, the smooth oval of black hair framing it, the look her skin had of pitted marble, once again it all struck him as elements of a Pieta, a gentle fond mother leaning over the squirming marble child in her lap. But he couldn’t summon the energy to tell her.

  She watched her hand as she drew it gently over his shoulder, along his ribs, down his thigh, and said, “You killed the wrong guy, Royce.” She held his sex and raised her eyes to his. Royce’s face became genuinely puzzled. By now she was pretty stoned herself, a languid morphine girl, and she wet her lips once, twice. “I called Thurman the other day, while I was out for groceries.” She nodded. The look on Royce’s face had turned to genuine bewilderment, and his breath had gone shallow and noisy. “You don’t have enough time to understand it all, Royce,” she said. “But you should know that the store robbery went exactly as I told you it did, except for one detail.”