Beat the Reaper

by Josh Bazell

  This time I tie my stitch more gently, and it holds. I’m surprised at how quickly the knot tying comes back to me, particularly with my forearm starting to make my fingers stiffen up. But anything someone teaches you to do first to the foot of a dead pig, then to the foot of a dead human, and finally to the foot of a live human, probably sticks in your memory permanently.

  “Suture,” Friendly says. The instruments nurse gives a stitch to Friendly, but it gets tangled in Friendly’s fingers, and Friendly angrily shakes it off into Squillante’s open abdomen.

  “You know what I should have done?” Friendly says. “I should have been a snake handler. It’s the same job but the pay is higher. Instead I save the lives of people who hope they’ll die on my table so I can get the shit sued out of me. Because that’s all anybody wants: a chance to take a queen out with a pawn.”

  “Dr. Friendly?” the scrub nurse says.

  “What?” Friendly says.

  “Who’s the queen in this scenario?”

  There’s another round of mask-hidden laughter.

  “Fuck you!” Friendly says, grabbing up the knotted length of stitch and throwing it at the scrub nurse’s face. It’s too light to make it that far, though, and it arcs toward the ground.

  For a second none of us realize that Friendly’s other hand has plunged his Bovie into Squillante’s spleen.

  Not just into it, either. Along it, slicing as it went. As we watch, the incision beads with blood, then starts to gush.

  “Oh, fuck,” Friendly says, yanking the Bovie free.

  The spleen is essentially a bag of blood about the size of your fist, to the left of your stomach. In seals, whales, and racehorses it’s large and holds an extra supply of oxygenated blood. In humans it mostly strains out old or damaged red blood cells, and also has places where antibodies can go to clone themselves when they get activated by an infection. You can live perfectly well without a spleen, and people who survive car crashes or have sickle-cell anemia frequently do. But you don’t want to rupture it suddenly. Because almost as many arteries lead to the spleen as lead to the stomach, so losing blood from there can kill you fast.

  Friendly rips the Bovie out of its power source and throws it to the ground, shouting “Give me some clamps!”

  The scrub nurse calmly says “Bovie down,” and tosses a handful of clamps onto the tray. Friendly grabs a couple and starts trying to pull the edges of the spleen wound together.

  The clamps tear right out, taking most of the surface of the spleen tissue off with them.

  Squillante’s blood starts to pulse out in sheets.

  “What’s happening?” the anesthesiologist yells from the other side of the curtain. “BP just dropped ten points!”

  “Fuck off!” Friendly says, as we both go into action.

  I grab a couple of clamps myself and start hunting out arteries. Just the biggest ones, since they’re all I can see through the fountaining blood.

  Friendly doesn’t hassle me when I clamp the left gastroepiploic artery, which runs toward the spleen along the bottom of the stomach. I’m not sure he even notices. But when I go for the splenic artery itself, which comes off the aorta like a spigot, he swats my hand away, causing me to almost kill Squillante outright.

  “What the fuck are you doing!?” he yells.

  “Hemostasis,” I tell him.

  “Fucking up my arteries, more like!”

  I stare at him.

  Then I realize that he actually thinks it’s possible to save Squillante’s spleen, rather than tying it off and removing it.

  Because if he saves it he won’t have to report slicing it open as a complication.

  The alarm goes off on Squillante’s blood pressure monitor. “Get him under control!” the anesthesiologist yells.

  Leading with my shoulder in case Friendly gets rambunctious again, I try once more for the splenic artery, and this time I get it closed off about an inch downstream of the aorta. The blood loss out the spleen slows to a wide, shallow leak, and the blood pressure alarm shuts off.

  “Suture and needle,” Friendly says through his teeth.

  Friendly starts to sew the wreckage of Squillante’s spleen into an ugly little lump. Halfway through, the needle breaks off.

  “Stacey!” Friendly screams. “Tell those fuckers to learn to make sutures, or I’m going to Glaxo!”

  “Yes, doctor,” Stacey says from somewhere that sounds far away.

  The next stitch holds better, or Friendly doesn’t yank on it as hard or something. “Can I have one of my arteries back now?” he asks me.

  “It’s not going to hold,” I say.

  “GIVE ME THE FUCKING SPLENIC.”

  I separate the handles of the clamp that’s holding the splenic artery closed. The spleen slowly reinflates.

  Then it splits in half along either side of the sewn-up incision, and sprays blood everywhere. As Friendly hurls the clamp in his hand against the wall, I reclose the splenic artery.

  “Clamp on the floor,” the instruments nurse says casually.

  “I’m taking the spleen out,” I say.

  “Fuck you. I’ll do it,” Friendly says.

  “I want to transfuse,” the anesthesiologist says.

  “Fine!” Friendly yells at him. “Hook him up, Constance.”

  Constance opens up a Coleman ice chest that says “Friendly” on it in permanent marker, and pulls out two bags of blood.

  “Is that shit cross-checked?” the anesthesiologist asks.

  “Do your job,” Friendly tells him.

  Together, Friendly and I remove Squillante’s spleen. It takes about an hour and a half. Friendly then orders one of my med students to run it down to Pathology, so that he can later claim he took it out on purpose, looking for cancer. Which I have to admit is a nice recovery.

  After that, the actual removal of the stomach is slow but mindless. We’ve already whacked half the arteries in Squillante’s abdomen. There’s nothing left to bleed. He’s lucky he still has blood going to his liver and colon.

  Reconnecting the esophagus to the intestine is more irritating, like sewing two pieces of cooked fish together. But even that gets done eventually.

  “Go ahead and close,” Friendly finally says to me. “I’ll go do the op report.”

  Closing will take at least another hour, and I’m as tired as I’ve ever been in my life. Plus the fingers of my right hand are cramping almost to the point of uselessness.

  But I’d rather close Squillante up alone than with Friendly. There are so many layers in the human body that even a good surgeon will skip sewing some of them up if the operation’s running late. As long as the layers closest to the surface are done, the patient won’t know the difference. They’ll just be more likely to rupture later on.

  And I, for one, want Squillante trussed as tightly as possible. Snug and waterproof as a latex dress.

  When I finally stumble out of the operating room, Friendly’s standing in the hall, drinking a Diet Coke and stroking the ass of a frightened-looking nurse.

  “Remember to will the thrill, kid,” he says to me.

  I’m not even sure if I’m awake. I’ve gotten through the last half hour by promising myself I’ll lie down the second I can. So maybe I already have and am now dreaming.

  “You’re out of your fucking mind,” I say.

  “Then I’m lucky this isn’t a democracy,” he says. “It’s an ass-kisstocracy. And I’m the king.”

  This last part he says to the nurse. I don’t care.

  I’m already staggering past him down the hall.

  I wake up. There’s an alarm going off like a truck backing up. Also a bunch of voices.

  I’m in a hospital bed. I have no idea why or where. Every wall except the one behind me is a curtain.

  Then my beeper and the alarm on my watch go off at the same time, and I remember: I lay down for a twenty-minute nap. In the recovery room. In the bed next to Squillante’s.

  I jump up and swat aside th
e curtain between his bed and mine.

  There are people all around him. Nurses and doctors, but also, near the foot of the bed, a pack of civilians. Aggressive family members, I figure, come to see how it has all turned out. The noise level is incredible.

  Because Squillante is coding.

  As I watch, his EKG stops jagging all over the place and flatlines, setting off yet another alarm. The medical people shout and throw hypodermics to each other, which they jab into various parts of his body.

  “Shock him! Shock him!” one of the civilians yells.

  No one shocks him. There’s no point. You shock people whose heart rhythm is wrong, not absent. That’s why they call it “defibrillating” instead of “fibrillating.”

  As it is, Squillante stays dead. Eventually the ICU assholes start giving up, and pushing the civilians away to have something to do.

  I try to figure out which civilian is Jimmy, the guy whose job it is to get Squillante’s message about me to David Locano in the Beaumont Federal Correctional Complex in Texas. My money’s on the guy in the three-piece suit who’s already pulling out a cell phone as he leaves the recovery room. But there are other contenders as well. Too many to do anything about.

  So I go to the head of the bed and tear off the printout from Squillante’s EKG machine. It’s perfectly normal up to a point about eight minutes ago, where it starts spiking all over the place.

  The spikes aren’t even close to normal. They form a bunch of “M“s and “U“s, like they’re trying to spell “MURDER.” I pick up the red “biohazard” bin and take it back around the curtain to where I was napping. Dump it out on the bed.

  Even with all the used syringes and bloody gauze squares, it doesn’t take long to find the two empty vials that say “Martin-Whiting Aldomed” on them.

  And which used to be filled with potassium.

  18

  Both of Les Karcher’s wives had been named Mary, though the younger one had been affectionately known within the family as “Tits.” The cops and paramedics found Older Mary in front of the house, where Skinflick and I had left her. Her skull had been crushed in, presumably by the iron stove grate that was found near her body, with (according to the Feds) no recoverable prints but a fair amount of Older Mary’s brain tissue on it. Tits, like the three male Karchers, was simply gone.* Unlike them, she hadn’t left any blood.

  That the Feds would charge me with the murders of the Marys and not those of the Karcher Boys, as the father and sons came to be called, made a certain amount of sense. The Marys were a hell of a lot more sympathetic, and the Feds had one of their corpses. And if the case didn’t fly, they could always charge me with the Boys’ murders later.*

  On the other hand, trying me for the murders of the Marys was in other ways a bad move, because I hadn’t actually done them. Any evidence the prosecution presented would be either fabricated or misinterpreted, and it would be impossible for them to disprove the “alternative explanation”: that Tits, after God knows what mistreatment over the years, had brained Older Mary and run off with the 200,000 dollars that one of the Ukrainian girls had overheard was in the house.

  Let me state for the record, by the way:

  Tits, if this is in fact what happened, then I bear you no ill will. Even if you were off somewhere the whole time, reading about my trial in the New York Post every day and laughing about how you could step in to save me at any time but weren’t going to—which I doubt—your actions are completely understandable.

  Though I can’t swear I’d feel this way if things had turned out differently.

  My “defense team” was assembled by the firm of Moraday Childe. It included, notably, both Ed “The Tri-State Johnnie Cochran” Louvak and Donovan “The Only Member Of Your Legal Team Who Will Ever Return Your Calls, Even Though Everyone Else Will Bill You $450 An Hour, Rounded Up, To Listen To Your Messages” Robinson.

  Donovan, who is now a Special Assistant in the Office of the Mayor of the City of San Francisco—Hi, Donovan!—is about five years older than I am, so at the time was around twenty-eight. He was sharp but looked stupid—Sorry, Donovan! I know what it’s like!—which is exactly what you want in a defense lawyer. He did his best to help me, I think because he believed I was innocent. At least of those specific charges.

  For example, Donovan was the first to pick up on how weird it was that I was being charged with murder involving torture, given that there was no evidence supporting the charge, and there was direct witness testimony from several of the Ukrainian girls that Older Mary had, if not directly participated in, then at least provided ancillary services to a couple of pretty horrific sessions. So it wasn’t a topic you’d think the prosecution would want to raise.

  Donovan came to see me one day in jail—funny, I don’t remember Ed Louvak ever doing that—and said, “They’ve got something on you. What is it?”

  “What do you mean?” I said to him.

  “They have some piece of evidence they haven’t told us about.”

  “Isn’t that illegal?”

  “Technically, yes. The rule is they have to show us anything they’ve got ‘in a timely fashion.’ But if it’s something good, the judge will allow it anyway. We can try for a mistrial on that basis, but we probably won’t get it. So if you have any idea what they might have, you might want to think about telling me about it.”

  “I have no idea,” I said. Which was the truth.

  David Locano was paying for all this, by the way, though not directly. He didn’t want a formal link to me, and probably also wanted to be able to cut me off if he thought I was turning dangerous to him or Skinflick.

  But at the moment there wasn’t any reason for that to happen. We all knew the Feds would hold off on prosecuting Locano for solicitation of murder until they had proven that I had, in fact, murdered someone. And Skinflick wasn’t even a suspect.

  Locano had kept Skinflick scrupulously clean. He had forbidden him to take credit for the hits unless it became clear that there wasn’t any heat. And he himself had never once mentioned Skinflick in connection to the Karchers outside of the steam room of the Russian Baths on 10th Street.

  Unfortunately, he had been a bit looser when it came to me. The Feds had about eight hours of recorded phone calls in which he referred to me as “The Polack.” As in “Don’t worry about the Brothers K. The Polack’s visiting them next week.” But at least that gave Locano a strong incentive to try to keep me from being convicted.

  The Feds told us about the tapes early, to encourage me to turn on Locano. They also told us they had some already-incarcerated mob guy who was willing to testify that, in general, I was a hitter who was known to do work for Locano.

  But the Feds were keeping the Mystery Evidence, if Donovan was right and they had some, a secret till the last moment.

  And in the meantime I rotted in jail.

  Wendy Kaminer, that genius, says that if a Republican is a Democrat who’s been mugged, then a Democrat is a Republican who’s been arrested. You might think a mafia hitman is not exactly the guy to be representing that argument, and in fact fuck me, but let me point a couple of things out.

  One is that, if you are accused—accused, mind you—of a capital crime, you will not be offered bail. I was in the Federal Metropolitan Correctional Center for the Northeast Region (FMCCNR), across from City Hall in downtown Manhattan, for eight months before my trial even started.

  Another is that, unless you’re a scary-looking famous hitman like I was, what will happen to you in jail will be a fuck of a lot worse than what happened to me. I was never forced to sleep next to the lidless aluminum toilet, for instance, which had a perfect surface-tension dome of urine, shit, and vomit at all times, just waiting to slop over any time anyone used it. I was never forced to do what they call “taking out the laundry,” or any of the other thousand fantastically imaginative degradations incarcerated people come up with to demonstrate their power over each other and to fight off boredom. Even the guards kissed my ass.<
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  And remember: this wasn’t prison. It was jail. The place they send people who are presumed innocent. In New York City, getting sent to Rikers Island (where I would have gone if my charges hadn’t been Federal) just means you’ve got charges pending.

  And you might think you’ll never end up there, because you’re white, so the justice system works for you, and you never smoke pot or cheat on your taxes or leave any other opening for anyone who wants to hurt you—but that doesn’t mean you won’t. Mistakes get made, at which point you will fall into the hands of what is essentially the DMV, but with much less stringent hiring requirements.

  And—even in New York City, and no matter who you are— your odds of getting arrested are about 150 times your odds of getting mugged.

  Plus, newsflash: jail sucks.

  Like they promise, it’s loud. Dog kennels are supposedly loud because any noise over ninety-five decibels is painful to dogs, so once one dog starts barking from the pain, all the rest start too, and the decibel count just keeps rising. In jail it’s the same thing. There’s always someone too crazy to stop screaming, and there are always the fucking radios, but those things are only part of it.

  People in jail talk constantly. Sometimes they do it to hustle each other. In jail, even the people so stupid you’re surprised they know how to breathe are constantly on the make. Because odds are good they’ll find someone even stupider than they are: someone more stressed-out, or more fucked-up on drugs, or whose mother drank more alcohol when she was pregnant with them or whatever.

  But people in jail also talk just to talk. Information, in a place that chaotic, comes to seem vital no matter what the quality.

  The real value of conversation in jail, though, seems to be that it keeps people from thinking. There’s no other way to explain it. People in jail will have a conversation with someone four cells away rather than shut their fucking faces for two minutes. Like there’s not enough noise from the guy knifing and/or raping someone near you, or sharpening his homemade syringe on the wall. People you threaten with death will keep talking to you.