The Killer Is Dying: A Novel

by James Sallis

  Small infarction. Stroke. Or simply low blood sugar, hypotension.

  As he rechecked the man’s vitals, Christian could feel himself gearing down. But others had gathered around to watch, making him acutely aware that, in violation of years of discipline, he had made himself visible. Vulnerable.

  “Do you know if he’s diabetic?”

  “I don’t think so. I don’t know. We just work together.”

  A young man, arms vivid with tattoos of imaginary beasts, had come out from behind the counter to ask if he could do anything.

  “Probably only his blood sugar or blood pressure bottoming out, but it could be almost anything. Has someone called for paramedics?”

  “On their way. We have to, whenever …” He pointed, apparently having used up all his words.

  “Good.” Slammed with sudden vertigo, right, left, up, and down gone missing from body and room—nothing to grab onto anywhere—Christian wasn’t sure he could stand, or move at all. Thankfully, it was passing.

  He looked at the clock. Unless the man was preternaturally patient, patience being altogether an unlikely virtue in a cop, he had missed his rendezvous with Sayles.

  And he sure as hell had to be out of here before paramedics arrived and started asking questions.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  WHY IT HAD TO BE some specific time, fuck if he knew.

  Just like he didn’t have a clue what the hell good any of this could possibly do. But sure thing, let’s get together at high noon and talk dolls. Why not. Be good for both of us.

  So what was it about the time? A busy social life? Places to go, things to do? Simple control? “May be something to do with the bounces,” Volheim had suggested, at Sayles’s look quickly adding, “The routing? How he hops between servers?”

  Sayles had just clicked on when the call came.

  “Gonna need your help,” Graves said at the other end.

  “You still at court?”

  “Well …”

  Sayles watched the hour roll up on the counter. No idea if Dollman would wait. Or if, bottom line, he even cared.

  “I’m in jail,” Graves said.

  “Sure you are.”

  “On contempt.”

  “You’re a cop, for godsake. You were giving testimony.”

  “We drew Judge Lang. Just a step or two to the right of—hell, you know him. Getting ready to put Sidney away for the rest of his life when I politely asked for a word to the court. Damn, Sayles, the man was a fucking hero. I’m maybe two sentences in, when Lang says ‘That will be enough.’ ‘No, it’s not enough,’ I said back, ‘not nearly,’ and I’m still saying my piece when his flunkies haul me out.”

  “He didn’t just fine you?”

  “Never went there. Sped right past, straight to lock-up.”

  “You must have hit a nerve—”

  “Or he was already up in the tower looking for someone to shoot, yeah. You know how some of these shirts are. Puts on that damn robe, thinks he can do whatever the hell he wants in his courtroom.”

  Sad fact is, Sayles thought, he pretty much can.

  “So where are you, Durango or Madison Street?”

  “Madison.”

  “Overnight, I assume, since he was that pissed.”

  “Yeah, rest of the girls oughta be here soon for the sleepover.”

  “Okay, stay put.”

  “Funny.”

  “I’ll go talk to the Cap. There’s not much to be done at this point—you know that as well as I do. And you’ll be out come morning, whatever.”

  Sayles hung up. Probably too late by now, but he logged on to the designated site anyway. Watched a discussion of snake handlers scroll steadily, line by line, down the screen, looking for the screen name Dollman said he’d be using. Hackneyed phrases passed through his mind: This cow don’t give milk, Elvis has left the building, Lights are on and nobody’s home.

  Giving that up, he swung the cursor to Google Hospice + Phoenix. Over a hundred thousand hits. Adding women took it down to about thirty thousand. He clicked at random and read swatches of articles about the city’s aging populace, baby boomers “easing” into their declining years, the exponential growth of extended-care facilities, family responsibility, community support. Many of the euphemisms had become as familiar to him and as oddly comforting as well-worn clothes. Declining years. Family ties. Waning faculties. Terminal care. Parades of word pairs that reminded him of comedy teams, one straight man earnest as the day is long, one innocent who just never quite gets it.

  And he’s been here, done this, how many times? Expecting what? To find something new? Suddenly to understand?

  What was there to understand?

  She was gone. Gone from his life, gone soon enough from her own.

  He picked the new glasses up off his desk and put them on, aware as he did so of the world rushing toward him, fitting itself around him, taking him in. Better when the world’s edges weren’t so clear, he thought, when they’re allowed to bleed, to run—that’s where the interesting stuff happens.

  So who was Dollman? And what was his interest in this? Chances that he had anything useful to offer were slim to none, of course. They’d had one brief Internet encounter before setting this up. Challenged, Dollman had provided details of the shooting—the attendants, what the victim had been wearing—but would go no further, proving only that he was present at the time. No proof at all that he wasn’t just another one of the sick puppies that always came lapping around.

  Sayles had picked at the doll thing till it went threadbare. Used up all his contacts, every resource person he knew inside and outside the department. Even called up a collector’s shop out in Mesa and spent close to an hour hearing about porcelain, composition, cloth, vinyl, hard plastic, bisque, tin-head, and ball-joint dolls. Specialty furniture and clothes. Eyelashes, rooted hair, feather brows, pierced ears. Chicago’s Doll Hospital, specializing in restorations of antiques. Dolly Lama out in Carslbad, chockful of ethnic and religious dolls. “Red Molly” Bing over in Utah with 4,673 dolls, so many that she bought a second house to put them in. There was a walkway …

  Sayles had begged off at that point. Thanked him and hung up with the familiar sense of having touched, just beneath the surface of his own, another, previously unsuspected world.

  Four thousand dolls. Never mind why, where did one get four thousand dolls?

  Not a lot of specialty shops like his, the young-sounding man in Mesa had said, but a few. He could close the shop down tomorrow, in fact, and thrive on mail order. There was a sizable network of collectors forever buying and selling. Trading, too—quite a lot of that. Newsletters. Local and national conventions and such, loads of informal get-togethers. Web sites, many of them with forums.

  Pushing up to the desk, Sayles thumped the mouse, watched Camelback and setting sun slide away. He clicked for Internet access, Googled doll, and hopscotched a dozen or so sites, winding up on eBay. Three or four of the descriptions sounded like close kin, he thought, similar phrasing, structure. Not too surprising, naturally, in such a niche market; formulas would develop, specific patterns of language emerge. “Item Location” listed one set of dolls (a family, no less) as being in Arizona, a Gilligan doll simply as “in the Great Southwest.” Different screen names on all. He’d have to ask Volheim if there was some way of tracing them, tracking down the sellers’ names and locations.

  “You stag?”

  He looked up. Will Stanford stood by the desk, tie stained with the remains of more than one meal but tugged into a perfect Windsor. Will pointed to the empty desk chair across from Sayles. “Flying solo, I mean. Or did Graves just finally get enough of you?”

  Which reminded him that he needed to go talk to the captain.

  Graves was thinking back to a response he’d been on when he was fresh on the streets. Some old guy called in a disturbance, his partner told him. Nine to one we get there and it’s the kind who doesn’t have a life, spends all his time worrying about what ev
erybody else in the neighborhood is doing. They arrived to find a boy about eleven years old ushering an adult along the sidewalk toward a typical mid-city ranch house. The man looked to be early middle age, forty to fifty, wouldn’t appear to need the help the boy was giving, but when you got close you saw something was wrong, something about the eyes and the way he moved. “He wanders,” the boy told them, saying he needed to get him indoors if that was all right. Inside they found a woman somewhat older, sixties maybe, with another child, female, attending her. The home was spotlessly clean, everything in place. Doilies on tables, antimacassars on chairbacks, framed needlepoint homilies on the wall. Love Binds Us, Bless This Our House.

  The kids were twins. Their father had been taking care of their mother up till a couple of years ago when he started getting sick too, at which point they had taken over care of both. Of course it was hard, they said when asked, looking surprised—surprised not at the question, but that the two policemen would think there was anything strange about their assuming care.

  Graves remembered the kids’ names, Alexander and Isobel. A lot of responds followed that one, he was new, shifts were packed with challenge, danger, new experiences, apprehension. So he never followed up, never found out what became of the family, what had been wrong with the older Glaisters. Never even thought much about it till years later, and when he did, he got to wondering if it might be something hereditary, something the kids had in them too.

  Probably best not to think about that, take that too far.

  Given where he was right now, probably best not to think too hard about much of anything.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  THE BOY CAN COOK.

  He didn’t know why, but the phrase, a remark his father had made years ago, always went through his mind when he was in the kitchen, rolled around and around in there like a loose ball bearing. He’d learned in pure self-defense, unable to digest, barely even to eat, what his mother put on the table those times she tried at all, but he’d come to like it. It made sense to him. Once you got the basic moves down, broiling, braising, browning, roasting, you pretty much had it. Reliable commonality in combinations of flavors, spices, and sauces, all built up from sweet, sour, savory, salty. You started with one thing, added others, turned it all into something else. Cooking made sense the way geometry or numbers made sense.

  He had put on stew meat earlier, fire as low as he could get it and as little water as he could get away with, and was chopping celery, onions, carrots, and potatoes to add.

  Cooking made sense. The dreams were another matter.

  This time he had been walking down a long corridor. People watched from within the frosted-glass doors that lined either side. He couldn’t make out features, couldn’t see the heads really—just ill-defined ovoids that changed shape behind the glass as they went from profile to straight to profile, tracking his progress. There were small numbers on the upper left-hand corner of the doors’ glass panels, like page numbers in a book: 231, 230, 229. And a window far ahead at corridor’s end, black beyond. As he passed door after door, though he still couldn’t really see them, the heads appeared to change more substantially, becoming larger, out of proportion, like the heads of animals.

  He never felt the pain, just looked down to see blood spreading over the cutting board, chopped onions gone pink. Even then, it didn’t register. He stood holding the knife in his right hand, thumb and middle finger still around the onion, tip of his index finger lying alongside. Interesting how, instead of blossoming into pain, the finger went numb, as though it were not even there, as though it were someone else’s finger. It bent when he willed it, but he couldn’t feel the movement.

  In the bathroom he ran cold water over the oozing raw flesh, poured peroxide over it, held a compress against it. Feeling slowly returned, first as pins and needles, then as burning pain. He’d dealt with injuries before, even closed a three-inch slice in his arm with butterflies improvised from adhesive tape, but he couldn’t think how he might be able to fix this. Supergluing the tip back on didn’t seem like a good idea.

  Mrs. Flores opened her door wearing an apron and a surprised expression. Her eyes went directly from his face to his hand. The washcloth he’d wrapped around his finger was dark with blood.

  Ten minutes later he was in her friend’s truck, a comfortably middle-aged Ford F-150 that had at least three different colors of paint warring across hood, fenders, and bed, being driven to a free clinic that, Mrs. Flores said, wouldn’t ask questions. She still had her apron on.

  Three hours after that, he was sitting at the table in her house having dinner with Mrs. Flores, her friend Felix, and two neighborhood kids of eleven or twelve who seemed simply to have wandered into the house in time to eat. Platters of machaca and of sizzling pepper and onions moved steadily around the table. Mrs. Flores heated tortillas on the open burner of her stove, dropping them on, turning, serving.

  His finger throbbed now. A big-nosed doctor had cleaned and bandaged it tightly. Very clean, he said. You may lose some feeling in that finger, but it’s going to be fine. We’ll give you a shot, antibiotics, just to be on the safe side. He looked at Mrs. Flores. Bring the boy back if he starts running a fever, sweating, drinking a lot, anything like that.

  The boy.

  Felix pushed the machaca toward him. “How’d you cut yourself?”

  “Not paying attention.”

  “How accidents mostly happen.”

  Jimmie didn’t have much by way of social conversation but gave it a shot. “What do you do, Mr.… ?”

  “Just Felix. Nobody calls me anything but Felix.” He exchanged glances with Mrs. Flores. “Drive trucks, mostly.”

  “He helps people,” Mrs. Flores said.

  “Like he did me, today.”

  “It was nothing,” Felix said, then, smiling at Mrs. Flores: “Es nada.”

  “I’m going to be a football player,” one of the kids said.

  “And I’m going to own my own business,” the other said.

  Jimmie asked him what kind of business.

  “Don’ know. Big one.”

  It was getting dark outside, trees going gray, fading into the grayness around them. Everyone said this used to be pure desert, then people moved in from elsewhere and brought along their trees and bushes and backyards. But everyone also said there used to be rivers here, and boats going down them, so go figure.

  “I should be getting home,” Jimmie said. “Can I help clean up?”

  “We can help, Mama Flores,” one of the kids said.

  “Looks like we have it covered, then.” Mrs. Flores leaned close to him as she scooped dishes from the table. “Are you going to be okay?”

  Jimmie stood, and nodded. “Thank you both, more than I can say.” He held out his hand, and Felix, looking a little surprised, shook it. They walked together into the front room. When Felix switched on the porch light and opened the door, a moth flew in. Without apparent effort or thought, Felix lifted his hand, intercepted the moth, carried it outside with them.

  “Roshelle wants me to tell you,” he said, “you need anything, you just come right on back here.”

  “I will. And thanks again.”

  Felix let the moth go. “A pleasure,” he said.

  Back at the house, Jimmie cleaned up the kitchen as best he could with one hand pretty much out of commission. The finger was thickly bandaged. The big-nosed doctor had cautioned him against getting the dressings wet. He felt every heartbeat there at the fingertip, like those cartoons where thumbs or heads blow up like balloons, deflate, and blow up again. He put the pot with the stew meat in the refrigerator, tossed the vegetables. He’d start fresh tomorrow.

  Flipping the computer on, he thought about Mrs. Flores, Felix, and the kids, this ramshackle, sort-of family of hers, as it booted up. He thought of the moth Felix had taken outside, and remembered his mother proudly showing him her mason jar of mosquitoes.

  Once when he was small, they’d been out walking and come acr
oss a pigeon with a broken wing. It must have just happened, he realized now, thinking about it. The bird would walk a few steps, then hop, trying to fly, as the wing just hung there, fanned out, at its side. The bird couldn’t understand: this had always worked. It took three steps, hopped again, fluttering the good wing. Jimmie looked over and saw tears on his mother’s face.

  Now, remembering that, what came to him was the thought of how panicked the bird must have been, how lost, how the only thing it could do was keep trying.

  He entered his password, travelR2, to check on orders. Four of them, including the set of luthier tools he’d figured to be a tough sell. He’d bought the set from the family of a Filipino ukulele maker; it came wrapped in goatskin, which was how, the family said, he always kept them. Jimmie acknowledged the orders, promised shipping first thing tomorrow, then e-mailed for package pickup. Business as usual. Not a big business, but his.

  He logged on to check payments, then began his cruise of sites where he regularly picked up items for resale. Over time he had found his way to some fairly obscure sites. These didn’t take long, as turnover was slow, and often a glance was enough before moving on. Even with the common sites, eBay and so on, one learned to scan efficiently: using keywords, selecting chronological entries, and skipping to the end, setting very specific search parameters.

  His eyes went down the pages:

  Printing press circa 1919, fully functional

  Loom, brought over from Scotland

  Artist action mannikin, 15 inch

  Planter made from authentic coolie hat

  Button collection, over 1,000!

  He read the entries, registered them as his eyes moved down the listings. He flagged four to keep watch on. But he wasn’t there, not really. He was walking down that corridor again, watching the featureless heads turn toward him. He was beside his mother on the street, watching the pigeon try to fly.