The Last Exit

by Michael Kaufman

  Pancho, his hands also cuffed behind him, was pleading with Les and two uniforms. “Come on, guys, let me wipe it up. Have some compassion here. You gotta give me that.”

  Jen and I couldn’t take her eyes off those cantaloupes in his cheeks.

  Les briefed us. There’d been a big screaming match. Neighbors phoned police. Right before police arrived, Olive had taken a hammer to Child’s Play, who went down for the count.

  “And?” Jen asked.

  “You mean,” said Les, “why did I bother calling you in?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Because—”

  Pancho and Olive amped up the volume.

  She said, “I told you not to trust him.”

  “He said there was no risk. No risk.”

  “That was our savings.”

  “We agreed it was a good idea.”

  “Yeah, to get it. But we didn’t agree to give him money in advance.”

  “He told me not to tell you.”

  “I married an idiot. A complete, stupid idiot.”

  As the argument waged, Jen turned back to Les. “Please, give me a hand here, Les. Zach’s waiting for me.”

  “It’s what they’re arguing over. It seems that Child’s Play promised to get them the treatment.”

  “Jesus.”

  “They claim they have no idea how he was getting it. Just that he promised to have it today.”

  “And?”

  “Not certain. Maybe he got ripped off himself. Or maybe he’s just scamming them.”

  “You got that from Child’s Play?”

  “He’s unconscious.”

  “Will he survive?”

  “No idea. I got it from these two, once I pieced together their incoherent bursts.”

  “Tattoo Man is going to be pleased as punch. Maybe you’ll get a day off for being a good boy.”

  Actually, Les was always a good boy. As much as he encouraged Jen to kick a bit of ass, his own interest in ass, so he often told her, had nothing to do with kicking. He did his job, bent rules like everyone else, talked back at times, but he always followed orders. He liked his job well enough, but his main career goal was an eventual pension.

  “You could have told me all this tomorrow,” Jen continued.

  “But that’s not it, Cobalt.”

  She waited.

  “They were saying things like, ‘We were gonna live forever’ and ‘What’s gonna happen to us now?’ They were talking about ‘getting it’ or ‘scoring some of the treatment.’”

  “Okay.”

  “But then once, just once, he didn’t call it the treatment.” Les held her eyes, making sure he had her full attention. “Pancho Porter said, ‘He promised to get us Eden.’”

  * * *

  Pancho and Olive were loaded into separate cruisers.

  Jen lingered at the open door of the car that had just arrived to take us home, her foot resting on the rocker panel. She volleyed questions at Les, none of which he was able to return.

  He said, “You don’t sound anxious to get going anymore.”

  “I promised to tell Zach about my mother.”

  “Oh. Want to come to the station and question these two?”

  “Yeah, maybe a good idea.”

  At the station, though, the suspects said they didn’t know anything. No, they had no idea where Child’s Play would get the treatment. And when asked about Eden, they glanced at each other, and then Pancho said they didn’t know anything about it other than what the Bible taught them. He demanded they each see a lawyer, and that was that.

  Les walked Jen to the front door. “You want to tell me what’s going on?” he said. “This Eden thing you were asking about?”

  I could tell Jen wanted to speak. But she had already crossed some uncrossable lines: disobeyed Brooks and broken into a crime scene one day, and removed evidence on another. She didn’t want to involve Les.

  Boss, you’re gonna have to.

  She stepped outside and with a metaphorical click, I disappeared.

  12

  A half hour later, Jen and Zach were on his rooftop with a bottle of vinho verde. No longer available from Portugal, this one came from one of the new vineyards in North Dakota, its green color diluted to the verge of nothingness.

  Back when they were still getting to know each other, Jennifer had told Zach the basics about her mother—the adjectives, as he had said. But when Zach met her mother, the two of them had hit it off, although she didn’t remember Zach from one monthly visit to the next.

  Jen took Zach’s hand, tilted her head, and stared up at the sky. There was too much ambient light to properly see the stars, but one thing was infinitely better than in her childhood: the air was no longer full of smog from car, truck, and bus engines.

  Some things do get better, she thought.

  “My dad left us when I was five,” she began. “Mother deleted or tore up every photo. He’s only a blurry image in my head.”

  Zach was watching her carefully. He had heard this part before.

  “Maybe he needed to leave her, I don’t know, but to abandon me like that, it’s … Until then, she was tough to live with, but from that moment on, she dragged me deep into her personal hell. I could never do right. Scolding me. Slapping me. Locking me in the pitch-black bathroom and telling me she was never coming back … Zach, I was only a little girl.”

  She held out her glass, and Zach steadied her shaking hand so he could pour her more wine.

  “The ice cream thing. I … I’ve never told anyone.”

  He gave a kind nod.

  “It’s really nothing.”

  He waited.

  “I don’t mean nothing. Just one of many things she did. The life I lived.”

  She started to bring the wine glass to her lips but stopped.

  “I was seven years old. We were in a park with her older cousin and her cousin’s husband, Reverend Chin. I was wearing the dress they brought me. It was the most beautiful thing ever, pink and full of lace and frills.”

  She caught Zach’s look. “Yes, even I went through a pink stage. They bought me a soft ice cream cone. Chocolate. Mother stooped down, wagged her scary index finger, and hissed, ‘You’ll be sorry, miss, if I catch you getting so much as one drop on your new dress.’”

  Jennifer’s wineglass was quivering in her hand. Zach took it from her and set it down on the patio deck.

  “I was trying to be so careful, but I was only seven. A huge plop of ice cream fell onto the dress. I tried to wipe it away with my little hand, but that only made it worse.

  “Mother noticed and slapped the rest of the cone away and yelled, ‘Look what you’ve done!’ Her cousin tried to speak, but Mother would have none of it. I was bawling by then, and Reverend Chin picked me up to console me, but Mother snatched me away.” She paused. “You heard enough?”

  Zach started to answer, but she could not stop.

  “We went home, just us two. Mother dragged me into the kitchen. She pointed at the table and barked at me to sit down. She pulled a tub of chocolate ice cream from the freezer, threw it into the sink, and ran hot water over it. I was terrified. I tried to imagine what was coming next. I could feel craziness pouring off her.

  “She grabbed the tub, ripped off the lid, and said, ‘You want ice cream? Well, here’s ice cream for you.’ She grabbed a handful of melting ice cream from the tub and crammed it into my mouth. Right away, she grabbed another handful and smeared it onto my mouth and nose. Another handful, she wiped all over my dress.

  “I was desperately trying to swallow, but the ice cream was so cold and there was so much. She started to tear at my dress—I mean, just tear it right off me. She was screaming, ‘See what you’ve done! See what you’ve done!’ She stuffed more ice cream into my mouth, and my nose was clogged with it, and I couldn’t breathe. I was suffocating. For seconds, hours, I couldn’t breathe and she was screaming, and I knew I was going to die.”

  Zach reached out, but s
he didn’t even seem to notice that his hand was on her arm.

  “Then I hit puberty and the true shaming began. I was too fat, I was too thin. The hair on my body was disgusting. My smell was disgusting. My nipples showed. I was a slut, I was a whore. I …”

  Jen tried to keep the tears from coming, but when Zach moved his hand to hers, she gripped it so tightly his fingers bleached white. She started sobbing.

  “I … I want to …” She grabbed a soft cushion, crammed it against her mouth, and screamed. Terror collided with anger and she cried, yelled, sweated, and shook as Zach held her tightly.

  And then it ended.

  She dropped the cushion, pushed him away, hard, and gasped for air. She slipped from her seat and collapsed onto the deck, panting like a spent athlete. With the bottom of her T-shirt, she wiped tears and snot from her face. She snatched up the pillow again and screamed some more, but this time, by the end she was laughing with tremendous joy. Eighteen years of that abuse until she left home; eighteen years, but she had survived.

  She reached out to Zach, pulled him back to her, pushed him away, tugged off his clothes and wrestled off her own, wet with sweat, snot, and tears. They threw cushions and pillows onto the deck and made love, feverish love turned gentle and then wild again, until they finally fell asleep, tangled together in the night.

  13

  Friday, July 12—07:42:22

  It was Friday the twelfth, which meant it was Friday the thirteenth minus one day, and so bad things were pretty close to happening. How did I know that? Preemptive apophenia. I was feeling more human by the second.

  07:42:34. First stop, the three-year-old Washington Charity Hospital Complex. Crowded. Smelly. Already shabby. Dangerous. Staffed exclusively with doctors and nurses here on temporary work permits. Most could get by in English or Spanish, but some could not. Some were exceptionally well trained; others held the equivalent of a Boy Scout first aid merit badge.

  Around town, the place was known as the Abattoir. One story has it that a guy was getting brain surgery when a shift ended. Hospital admin refused to pay overtime. Doctors signed out, man had to finish the brain surgery on himself. Why do I know this is BS? Because there’s no way they’d try to pull off brain surgery in this place.

  Which made it a pretty crappy place for Child’s Play to be bunking down with a head injury.

  With Les leading the way, we slalomed through the crowded lobby, waited too long at the sorry bank of elevators, decided to take the filthy stairs, raced each other laughing up to the fourth floor—Jen easily won—and trekked down a vomit-brown corridor lined with gurneys holding soiled patients who moaned, screamed, retched, and begged for a swift death.

  We had been told on the phone what to expect, but Les insisted we double-check for ourselves. He was convinced the nurse he spoke to hadn’t understood what he was asking, and he was certain that another was keeping us away because he came from a country where the cops’ main job was to extort money and kill people.

  Sure enough, Child’s Play was still unconscious, with so many tubes and wires coming in and out of him that he looked like a miniature oil refinery. We talked to a nice Lebanese doctor who spoke English better than Hammerhead, whose ancestors had come from England 150 years ago. But to be fair, all Hammerhead had under his belt was the gutted US public school system, while the doctor had the unfair advantage of living in a war zone and refugee camps. The doctor promised to contact us the minute Child’s Play woke up.

  As soon as we left the hospital, Les took off to bid farewell to one of our old folks he had dealt with. “Fabulous woman, incredible community builder,” he said. “Exiting tomorrow.”

  Jen and I ambled back to the station, me talking and then shutting up whenever Jen said she needed to think. “Mind if I follow along?” I asked.

  It was Eden, of course, and the Bible thing that had been pinging in and out of her brain for days.

  Her mind was drifting back and forth. Then she focused again on the receipt tucked inside the Bible, the receipt for the phone. In her mind’s eye, I saw it in her hand. A tingle of energy flashed through her brain, and I felt her excitement as she turned it over and saw a series of words and numbers scribbled on the back. But they were blurry—in the memory, that is. There and not there at the same time. What words, what numbers? she thought. And what do they mean?

  * * *

  10:18:35. Jen was yawning. And yawning.

  “What’s up, sleepyhead?” I said.

  “Sleepyhead? Aren’t you the regular guy.”

  “Good late night?”

  “Amazing late night.” Jen sighed, then slapped the table. “So?” she said.

  Clairvoyant that I am, I gave her a quick rundown on the research she had requested. Turned out that the articles on mental health issues among the Timeless were all anecdotal—stories of specialized clinics in California, Florida, and Connecticut, but nothing more. Any serious research had been suppressed by the drug companies under the Improving Pharmaceutical Research Act of 2030.

  “Estimates are that fifteen to twenty Timeless popped themselves off in the US last year.”

  Jen said, “That’s not so many.”

  “Are you kidding? No one knows how many Timeless there are here, but I’d put my money on four to six hundred.”

  “You have money now?”

  “It’s an expression.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “Anyhow, the program is still new, it’s staggeringly expensive, and only people getting old would be willing to experiment with this.”

  “Still, twenty suicides aren’t many.”

  “Boss, leave the math to me, will you? It’s three hundred and eighty-five times the national average.”

  After that display of computational brilliance, it was a bit of this and that until Jen and Les were summoned to Captain Brooks’s office. At his door, an unfriendly plainclothes guy glanced at our badges before letting us in. Never seen anything like that before. I figured it was because the tattooed man in the gray suit had returned to our station.

  I was hoping the captain would offer us a coffee because I liked the buzz. He didn’t even offer us a seat. We stood but didn’t exactly snap to attention. I mean we’re cops, not jarheads.

  Gray Suit was once again in a gray suit, but this one had almost invisible ferns woven into it. With his first question, he quietly took charge. “Why are you two still standing?” He looked at the two extra chairs, which, as usual, were stacked with reports. “Captain,” he said, “think we can make these two a bit more comfortable?”

  Brooks didn’t seem happy getting orders on his own turf, but he cleared off the papers and grunted that we should sit down. The martinis and hors d’oeuvres would be arriving any second.

  Les recounted what Olive Ortega and Pancho Porter had said. He said that the victim and alleged dealer was still unconscious, a fact of which Gray Suit was obviously aware. Jen added her own recollections.

  Gray Suit listened, never once interrupting. He wasn’t a fidgety listener. He never took his eyes off the person speaking, and only when Les or Jen ran out of things to say did he add another question or ask for a clarification.

  He asked why Les had called Jen in. “I understand from your captain that it was her night off.”

  “It was,” Les said. “But this was a family we’d dealt with several times before. Jen was good at talking them down. Anything could happen with those two, and I wanted her there.”

  Gray Suit studied Les. He brushed the back of his fingers over the tattoos on his cheek, perhaps checking whether he’d done a decent job shaving that morning. It’s a strange thing talking to someone whose face is given over to geometric patterns—it’s damn hard to see beyond the tattoos, to look them in the eyes.

  It also made him a formidable enemy, which I kind of figured was the whole point. As he watched Les, I felt adrenalin flooding from Jen’s adrenal medulla. Her heart rate increased and she fought to control her breathing. As if se
nsing this, Gray Suit turned his attention to her.

  “Anything else to add?” he asked her.

  She said no.

  He observed her for an uncomfortably long 9.42 seconds. And then thanked the two of them for taking time to speak to him.

  We left, passing by the man at the door.

  Secret Service, I said to her.

  As soon as we returned to our office, Les shut the door—something we rarely did—and turned to Jen.

  “You better tell me what’s going on here,” Les said.

  “I don’t want to get you in trouble.”

  “You’re kind of late for that. I just lied for you.”

  “More trouble, then.”

  “I swear, that guy outside was Secret Service.”

  “I know,” Jen said.

  “It doesn’t make sense.”

  “The president and VP are both Timeless.”

  “So?”

  “Secret Service does the Executive branch,” Jen said. “The top woman and man are Timeless. Timeless don’t want everyone getting the treatment.”

  “Seems a stretch.”

  “Just maybe it’s true.”

  “Anything just may be true.”

  Jen walked to the window, and we stared out. The leaves on the beautiful sycamore tree were a dusty brown, curling up on themselves.

  “Do you think,” she said, “it will ever rain again?”

  “Cobalt, I’ve always trusted you. You’ve got to trust me.”

  “I will. I promise.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “When?”

  She turned back to the window.

  “Tonight,” she said.

  Code word for when P.D. and I are switched off.

  Bad move, I said.

  She didn’t even bother to reply.

  * * *

  An hour later, we were downstairs in an interview room with Olive Ortega. We had already wasted fourteen minutes with her husband. Pancho Porter had obviously seen his share of TV cop shows and refused to say anything without a lawyer present. Couldn’t say I blamed him, but damn him anyway. We stared at his trumpeter’s face while he stared at his fingernails. At one point, I suggested to Jen that we ask where he bought the cantaloupes.