The Killer Is Dying: A Novel

by James Sallis

  Now, awake in another motel room, in another city, in what seems almost another country, he turned his face again to the window, slowly realizing that there were no lights outside, that the power had gone out.

  How long?

  He’d taken a whole pill, and when he did that he often slept without knowing he slept, suspended neither here nor there, sleep or wakefulness, dream images drifting in and out of his mind.

  The city had grown unpredictably, uncontrollably, spurting within a few years from a modest western city to the fifth or sixth largest in the country. Freeways and streets couldn’t keep up; brownouts were common.

  Lights flickered, dimmed, flared once, and went out. North and south-southeast, sirens sounded.

  So: he thrived on order, on having the next step in place, following it to its conclusion. But what was the next step?

  His client sat somewhere in a fine house or condo, in a restaurant, in a corporate office, awaiting notification that the doll had been sent. Or, for all he knew, his client might have his own communication lines, might believe that he’d already made the move, and failed.

  He had failed twice before, but never like this. Another predator had taken his prey. If there was a way to get close to Rankin now, damned if he could think of it. And with the cops dialed in hard on Rankin, he couldn’t stay far enough away.

  So what was he to do?

  And what the hell had happened back there?

  Reason and every instinct within him told him to forget it. Walk. Rearview mirror time. Leave it alone.

  Then, it seemed but moments, there was a knock at the door and a voice calling out, “It’s checkout time, sir,” sunlight strong against the curtains. The bedside clock blinked at 2:36, which must be when the power went down. And checkout time meant it had to be, what, eleven? noon? He had slept, slept soundly, for hours. Now he had only to dress, grab the bag packed last night. Ten minutes and he would be gone, a shadow.

  CHAPTER NINE

  POWER HAD GONE OFF during the night.

  So, apparently, had Josie.

  Home late and soon crashed, Sayles was up at six, straightening things in the kitchen, making coffee and tea, looking out at the leaf-strewn yard. He wasn’t much for lawn care, but he’d have to get out there and rake pretty soon, at least pick up the branches and blown-in trash.

  He was still wearing yesterday’s clothes. Put tea and a slice of Sara Lee coffee cake on the tray, knocked on Josie’s door, and waited as he always did before going in.

  The bed had been stripped, sheets folded neatly at one corner of the bottom, blanket and comforter at the other. Her bedside table was bare save for a mostly empty tissue box. In the bathroom toilet he found the remains of maybe half a dozen capsules and pills. The rest flushed?

  An envelope on the caseless, sweat-stained pillow had on it only the outline of a heart in purple ink.

  I knew you would never agree to it, and would do your best to talk me out of it, so this was the only way I could manage. Please do forgive me. Never have I intended to break your heart. And that is exactly what I am doing.

  I’ve had the number of a women’s helpline for a long time, and tonight I called. Three came, all of them volunteers who’ve lost husbands or children, or who are themselves survivors. They helped me pack up the few things I need, helped me to the van. You were snoring as we went out. Another hard day at work, I guess. But aren’t they all?

  I’m not a survivor, Dale. I’ve known that all along.

  I don’t want to fight this—something you can’t understand, it’s just not in you, not in your nature.

  Please give me some time, then I’ll be in touch. I’m in good hands, and well cared for. I know you can find me, but I’m hoping that you, like the hospice, will honor my wishes.

  I love you so much, Dale. You have been kinder than angels.

  That was it. No signature, just another small heart.

  Months ago she’d started leaving the TV on all the time, day and night, volume turned down to a whisper. Gave her comfort, he supposed. As though she were not alone. As though there were people in the next room going on with their lives. Leaving, probably because it had become so integral to her environment that it didn’t even register, she had neglected to turn it off.

  A program about rebuilding a home.

  It was one modern equivalent of prayer, he supposed. Things got really, really bad, you sent out a plea, someone bailed you out. A nurse had been shot by a man she’d previously taken care of, who had developed an obsession with her. She was now paraplegic and it was all she and her husband could do to keep things together; even the house was falling down around them. So these group-hug types came in, sent the family off on vacation and, to the accompaniment of rock music, loud shouts and power tools, built them a new house.

  “Where are you?”

  Sayles surfaced. The screen saver had come up on the computer, a sunset over Camelback Mountain, so he’d been sitting at least fifteen minutes without seeing. Meanwhile Graves had rolled his chair over and sat rocking it back and forth in place, heel, toe, heel, toe.

  There are days, Sayles thought, when alien abduction doesn’t sound so bad. He exhaled slowly. “What?”

  “The thing that’s not quite right—like you’re always saying?”

  “Okay.”

  “This took some planning, some thought. The guy had to get in there, not get noticed.”

  “Right. So he was probably wearing a suit, or shirt and tie, looked like he belonged, nothing to stand out—we’ve been over that.”

  “He knows where Rankin is, or finds him without difficulty. Seems to know what he’s doing. They’re alone in there, he has a gun. So why isn’t Rankin dead?”

  “We—”

  “But that’s not my point. Look. The gun goes off, Rankin pulls the coffeemaker off the counter as he drops, people are down that hall and in there in seconds. Where’s the shooter go?”

  “Who knows? Down the stairs. To the bathroom.”

  “He’s just shot a man but he mixes right in, walks away. No one sees him. That’s not a thief, or an angry husband. That’s someone cool, someone who’s done this before.”

  “A pro.”

  Graves nodded. “But he doesn’t finish the job. He’s not interrupted, it’s just the two of them, and he walks away.”

  Sayles hoped the aliens would arrive soon. He didn’t want to be here with Graves. He didn’t want to think about Rankin and what happened to him or why or who. Most of all, he didn’t want to go home. He hadn’t told Graves about Josie, just came on to work like usual. Strength was not about overcoming things. Strength was about accepting them.

  Graves started away, then rolled back.

  “Something else?” Sayles said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay …”

  “It’s lunchtime.”

  They were almost history, desk papers blowing up in the wake of their departure, when Sergeant Nichols stuck his head out to tell them they had one and they were just absolutely going to goddamn love it.

  “Gotta be a pony here somewhere.”

  Sayles looked at him.

  “All the blood, I mean,” Graves said. “It’s an old joke. This guy—”

  “I know the joke, Graves. We all know the joke.”

  And there was indeed a lot of it. On the bed. Down the side of the bed. On the wall behind. In the slipper beside. Smeared everywhere on the floor.

  “Janice Beck,” the responding officer said. “Thirty-one, lives alone according to the call-in, a neighbor, but evidence of both a male and a young child.”

  “Tags?”

  “Estranged husband.”

  Classic tag. Right up there with the live-at-home son, discharged lover, double-dipping boss. Sayles looked over to where Graves stood by the splatter on the wall, holding his hand just over it the way people sometimes do over paintings at museums, moving the hand around. Patterns.

  “Recent?”

  “Better tha
n a year, neighbor says.”

  “Child?”

  The officer shrugged.

  “And no body, Dispatch said.”

  “Just this.” He nodded toward the bed. “Car’d been in the driveway three, four days, maybe longer, no sign of activity. Neighbor came over, no response, called it in.”

  Sayles looked at the borders of the pool by the bed. “Blood’s not that old. Three, four days.”

  “Starts to congeal in three to five minutes once it’s exposed to air,” Graves said as he joined them. “Depending on temperature and—”

  “Large woman? Small?”

  “Five-six or so, by the neighbor’s judgment.”

  “Then, that much blood, it’s gotta be better than forty percent of her volume. There’s a body. You did the walk-through, right?”

  “Right. After we spoke with the neighbor, came in and found this.”

  “Entry?”

  “Took a crowbar to the front door. Locked—back one, too.”

  “Air’s set at sixty-eight,” Graves said from the hall. “Dishes washed and in the drainer. Towels, washrags hung neatly in the bathroom, look fresh. Over-the-counter sleep aid, bottle of Claritin that looks almost full.”

  “Closets?”

  The officer nodded. “Clothes, boxes, shoes. Couple of unused suitcases, tags still on them. And no, I didn’t touch anything. Eyes only.”

  Sayles took a closer look, thinking they mostly looked like kids these days. But this one didn’t. The odometer had been around a time or two. Fiftyish, but with the attitude of someone much younger. Interesting. “I didn’t ask,” he said.

  “And I appreciate that.”

  Sayles could hear Graves moving around in the front room. Out the window he watched the officer’s partner pace the afterthought of a backyard and alley. His age, mid-twenties, with that brush-cut hair, you could bet on his calling it checking the perimeter.

  Graves hollered in, “Lab’s on the way.”

  The officer stepped to the window and tapped at it, beckoned. “You okay with the scene here, Jack and I’ll get started on the house-to-house.”

  “Sure thing. Good job, by the way.”

  “Not my first time at bat.”

  Sayles walked to the other side of the bed, opened the drawer of the mismatched nightstand there, shut it, and peered into the space between headboard and wall. Honeycombs of cobwebs in there. The bed wasn’t square to the wall. The nightstands weren’t square to wall or bed. Even the ceiling looked off plumb, cockeyed. Settling? Or just hasty workmanship?

  The floor was laid with tiles from the fifties. Sayles remembered his old man putting down tiles like these in the house on Fisher Road, covering up what he now knew to be a gorgeous old wood floor. Some kind of sealer that never quite dried, then a paste of black, tarlike goop. The tiles were thick as dinner plates. Had to cut them, carefully, with a knife like Captain Hook’s hand, press them in place with a roller that went toe to toe with the old man in weight. Sayles was four or five at the time.

  And something now was nibbling at his heels, trying to break through into consciousness.

  He paced the room, over to the ancient oak dresser with silver-spotted mirror, no photographs or keepsakes stuck in at the join of wood and glass, back to the bed, to the shelves on L brackets by the door (a bud-shaped flower vase half filled with coins, seven well-read historical novels in paperback, envelopes neatly squared and bound with wide rubber bands, a coffee mug of pens, pencils, and pipe cleaners), peered into the closet and half bath.

  Something.

  It was the smell, he finally realized, reaching past all the blood, through all those years.

  Camphor.

  Mothballs.

  He stood by the cedar chest in the room’s corner remembering the one his mother had when he was a kid. He didn’t know what happened to it, it wasn’t there by the time he was puttering about the house on his tricycle, but he remembered the smell. The chest was filled with sweaters and heavy clothes they never wore, linens and towels kept for guests they never had. And it was forbidden to him.

  Beneath the cushions atop, it apparently having served as a makeshift sofa, the cedar chest wasn’t quite closed, and the smell, the camphor smell, was coming from within.

  Sayles removed the cushions and opened the chest knowing what he would find. It was a small chest, too small. There were marks on her torso where the killer had knelt on her to force her body inside. Her neck and arms had been broken in the process. Later they would find the child’s body below hers. The child had been alive when put into the cedar chest. He had died of suffocation. Both of them had smiley-face stickers on their foreheads.

  CHAPTER TEN

  HIS FEET WERE ON FIRE.

  He had no idea where he was. He could see the sun low through the trees. The last thing he remembered was the sound of heavy artillery, the thwack of chopper blades. Now it was quiet. Scattered bird calls high in the trees. Rumblings far off that could as easily be firepower or a storm building. In his sleep, if it was sleep, or maybe before, he’d pissed himself. He pushed up on hands and knees, and insects went rattling away from him through the ruff of dry leaves.

  Letting himself fall back over, he rolled and slowly pushed with his hands into sitting position. The dizziness passed, but he still was not seeing clearly; everything upon which he focused, trees, the burned-out stump beside him, his boots, had two or three borders. It took a while to get the laces undone, the phrase Died with his boots on running stupidly in his head the whole time.

  At first he’d thought it was leached color from the olive canvas boots. Too green, though—and growing. Alive. He remembered a photograph that an uncle had showed him of his house in New Orleans, sidewalk, wood, even cement blocks covered with a patina of green. The growth on his feet went from green to black. No idea what part was fungus or mold, what part rotting skin. He didn’t want to think about that. But his feet itched like mad and burned like fire.

  His socks were soaking. He swung them in circles, pushing out as much wet as he could, wiped between his toes with a handful of leaves, put socks and boots back on, and, hand against the burned-out trunk, experimentally stood.

  —And woke, What the hell?, instinctively swinging out of bed to put his burning feet on the floor, toes curling around the carpet’s nap.

  The clock blinked at 2:35. Jimmie walked to the window and looked out. No lights anywhere. The storm, he supposed. But he had slept through it. His heart still hammered. Strange how quiet it was, sounds so familiar as ordinarily to go unremarked now conspicuous in their absence: box fan wobbling and gently bucking near the door, that faint buzz of wires in the walls, hum of the refrigerator two rooms away.

  He hadn’t returned the pan to Mrs. Flores yet. Why he thought of that now, he didn’t know. Why he hadn’t done it, he didn’t know. He’d scrubbed the pan, dried it; it had been sitting on the counter since.

  Something else he was supposed to do as well …

  The storm had long passed. He watched a police helicopter circle in the sky over toward Black Canyon Freeway, its spotlight lashing in crisscross patterns. Power came on—he heard the click of relays in the cooling system, felt a brief whoosh of breath from the fan—then again shut down. He’d fallen asleep without shutting off lights, and they had come back on just long enough that his eyes had to readjust to the darkness. As they did so, and as stars came back into the sky above, he remembered.

  The telescope.

  It was supposed to have gone out days ago. He’ d bought it from a woman in Texas whose grandfather had recently died. Produced by a company that, originally a processor of 3-D films, had surfaced briefly in the fifties to send into the marketplace a stream of high-quality, low-cost optical products—microscopes, binoculars, reading glasses, prisms—the telescope shared its birth year, 1957, with Sputnik. And the Seattle-based collector of all things Sputnikian would be wondering where his expensive telescope was.

  Very unlike him to forget things l
ike this, not to follow through. Maybe those dreams were having a greater effect than he realized. Taking their toll. He’d have to send an e-mail to the buyer right away.

  Automatically, he went to the computer and hit the switch. Nothing. Of course. No power. And standing there, for a moment he felt something he couldn’t at first identify, then knew to be panic—occasioned, he initially thought, by his lapse. But the veil fell away, and he came to understand that the feeling was something more elemental: panic at being out of touch, at having his connection to the world torn away.

  The moment, the feeling, quickly passed, but a shadowy residue, like an afterimage, remained.

  When the lights flared back to life, he stood there blinking.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  FOUR YEARS AGO he’d hit a pothole.

  Man’s name was Les Baylor, and he worked midnight shift at a hospice, there for most of his adult life, twenty-some years. His routines had been simple to track because they were just that, routine, hard and fast. Lived in an unadorned, unkempt, underpopulated apartment complex eight blocks from the hospice. Stopped off at the Recovery Room for a beer on his way home when working since the Recovery Room opened at six A.M., walked up that way most late afternoons for an hour or so. Two, three beers was his limit. Breakfast he took at the hospice cafeteria. Every other evening he visited Blackhawk Diner for the special of the day; the rest, he dined at home on sandwiches and the occasional order-in pizza.

  After it was done, Christian stood in the apartment looking around. Such a bare existence had gone on here. No television, maybe a dozen library books long overdue. Three radios, one for each room including the bathroom. Jeans, shirts, and scrubs folded and kept in layers on steel shelves in the single closet, socks and underwear left jumbled in a laundry basket beneath. No medications in the bathroom, only toiletries, comb and brush, safety razor caked with mineral deposits. In the kitchen, bags of health-food cereal, a keglike container of orange juice, cheese and cold cuts, mustard, milk, dark bread.