The Death Panel

by Cheryl Mullenax (Ed)

  * * * *

  Another one on the corner. Cop number seven? He’s a big buck though, worth about three of the regular ones. He sees what’s under Jack’s arm and laughs.

  “I used to play football,” the Seventh Cop says, holstering his Ruger but forgetting the snap like they always do. “Try to get by me.”

  “I used to play football, too,” Jack says. “Until I realized the ball wasn’t made of real pigskin.”

  At this, the cop looks furious and gives away the pivot foot he’s going to use. Another tell. Jack runs, jukes, spins, skips, even jumps over a candlestick, and in the end, just like magic, he slips the tackle and he comes up with the cop’s gun. He’ll use his Ruger on him, of course, saving the shotgun shells, but he won’t keep his weapon. He’s still digging the .38. Police-issue since the ’20s. They never should have stopped.

  “Hell, how much shit can one man carry?” he asks the Seventh Cop who is crawling toward a drain as if it’s the answer. “Sometimes you got to make a choice. Fish or guns.”

  At some point, the Seventh Cop is saying he doesn’t deserve to die. Saying that he was only working tonight to do seatbelt checks at the corner. The shotgun shuts him up, and this murder feels like a crossroads. Only because Jack’s on the 50-yard line now, and there’s finally less field in front of him than behind.

  * * * *

  Deep into the rampage, tiny dorsal fins are breaking the surface. He can smell them drying out, too. After hitting that pet store, there’s now more fish than water. He needs to fill it back up. He crashes through the door chimes at a gas station, tracking blue blood and feathers in across the tile. At the counter, he asks a jaded clerk for the key to the toilet. Without looking up, the clerk grumbles “employees only.” Shotgun behind his back, cookie jar in both hands, he clears his throat and sets it down next to the animal shelter donations and beef jerky.

  “Listen, here’s the thing. A goldfish swallowed all my money. And I need to pay the rent in about ten minutes to keep a roof over some miserable pregnant bitch’s head. But tonight I’ve done so many things I never thought I would do just to keep these fish alive, and I’m not sure why. And for some ridiculous goddamn reason, I feel the need to protect them no matter what. So, if you could just let us all swim in your toilet a little while, you’d really be helping me out.”

  Jack counts to eleven as the clerk looks up, chews some gum, and soaks in the story.

  “Go ahead,” the clerk finally says, as if his story made perfect sense. “Back through the cooler past the power drinks.”

  It’s the most compassion Jack has ever felt for another human being. But not fish, of course. He splashes water in the bowl, on his face, and the cold water revives the goldfish just as much as the clerk revived him. Tonight he feels like he can kill every cop on the planet. Then fold them in half nine times.

  Outside the gas station, he kills his Eighth Cop, a woman of all things. He was starting to forget they existed. He has no guilt as he empties his Glock for good, the rest of the clip overwhelming a carefully placed shot from her SigP229 meant to stop his heart but having no discernible effect. No guilt at all as he thinks back to all the role-playing porn he snuck into the bathroom in school and how women in any position of authority, teacher, doctor, librarian, hell, even a four-star general, were his favorites. With one exception. A ragged mag he stole from his daddy, one with an especially baffling title that should have reduced any chance of intimidation, Busty Cops III: Calling All Eunuchs!

  But when he opened it up … nothing. It was only the spreads where a woman dressed as a cop that killed his erections. Now he was paying them back for every one.

  * * * *

  He’s in field goal range, but he chooses to run. He stiff-arms a pimp, stiff-arms a bum, stiff-arms a crazy cat lady that stinks like piss who makes a grab for the ball. Breathing hard through a hole in his chest, he takes a time-out at an open-all-night drive-thru where the miniature golf course used to be. There’s a girl at the window he’s been eyeing, and he thinks tonight’s the night to take his imaginary relationship to the next level. When he first saw her, she just said “hello,” all formal. Then it was “hi.” Last time it was “oh, hey.” All the encouragement he needs.

  He’s sure he senses recognition when she sees him. And she does. But only because she can see him on the camera before he gets to the window. It’s recognition from twenty yards back that he mistakes for encouragement.

  “Oh, hey.”

  “Can I get some water?”

  “No walk-ups, sir,” she says as a full minute ticks by. Then, “Get the fuck out of here.”

  “Um … I’ll take a bag of goldfish crackers, please.”

  “We only sell those with our chicken soup.”

  “If you give me a bag of goldfish crackers, you’ll never see me again, I promise.”

  “Coming right up!”

  She throws a handful of bags at him and slams the window shut. Running again, he’s thinking he can swap the crackers out with the goldfish. But the crackers don’t look anything like he remembers. Way too small. And there’s too many flavors to choose from.

  He drops a couple into the football anyway, but the experiment’s a failure. They stain the water like piss and blood as he watches them dissolve. Bad idea, sure. But nowhere near his worst.

  Still almost as much fish as water. Always almost as much fish as water.

  * * * *

  Running hard. Running hard. Inside the 15-yard line. Goalposts in sight.

  The slumlord.

  The only person on the block who can afford a satellite antenna that big.

  He passes a priest locking up a church. Sunday morning already? He punches him in the face on the way by, a tenderizer right hook where his smile used to be.

  “Why?!” the priest wails from the sidewalk.

  “Because it’s the nicest thing I’ve done all night, daddy, I mean, father.”

  Over his shoulder, he sees the priest slump and vanish under his long black coat, and Jack can’t resist a joke his daddy told him after he punched his first nun on a Sunday.

  “I thought you’d be tougher than that, Batman!”

  * * * *

  Running. Running. Running. Two bullets made his leg faster. One bullet made his heart stronger. He asks the next cop what the fuck a seatbelt check is.

  “That’s like saying it’s a ‘smile check’ or something,” Jack laughs. “I mean, I would just make sure I’m not smiling by the time you got to my car.”

  “What are you talking about?” the Ninth Cop asks, hand hovering over his holster.

  “How could you prove I wasn’t wearing it?” Jack asks, scratching and stretching hard to reach the spot on his back where the shotgun is nested. “Unless you roll some obstacle out into the path of the car to make me wreck. So, is that what a seatbelt check is? Never mind.”

  The shotgun comes over his head as the Ninth Cop draws his Springfield XD. A small gun. Something the new kids are packing. It’s no match. He wonders if the Blues Man was right. Do they think he’s just white enough to hesitate? Does it give him the edge? Now he remembers the story. His cousin Odell didn’t hide under a pig to sneak out of that cave.

  He hid under a sheep.

  Boom.

  Daddy always called cops “Lloyds,” and Jack thought that was their real name until he turned 18. Turned out it was short for “mongoloids,” which seemed harsh for a whole hour after he first deciphered it.

  Another dead fish in the football. Only three left swimming. He cuts it open with a thumbnail to see that it’s empty. Is he crying? No, just blood. He needs to kill another cop to even the score. Will that make ten? He needs the same number of fish to keep track easier. That shouldn’t be too hard.

  The Tenth Cop dies screaming, so Jack decides to gut him this time. When he runs out of thumbnails, he uses the edge of a handcuff. Turns out they look just like us on the inside. The fish, not the cops. But he swears their hearts might be a little sma
ller. The cops. Not the fish.

  * * * *

  Slumlord then home. No. Home then slumlord. He’s got five minutes. He needs to see his woman. Needs to see if it was all worth it. He paid her debt with the junkie, gonna pay the rent next. He even paid for her teeth once, even though she only used the appointment to get pain killers, and she didn’t thank him then either.

  He calls her on a pay phone to put a toe in the water, and she’s yelling already. Never any good news with her.

  “Why the fuck are you calling me? I can see you from here!”

  He runs up the steps of their building, the burning smell he recognizes immediately as home. The smell of smoke and ash used to tell a cavemen to run. Now it meant dinner. Or her kiss. She turns the corner, a cigarette in each corner of her mouth. Yep, it’s just her. Arms crossed and a gas can balanced on eight months of stomach. Maybe it’s not dinner after all.

  “Where’s the fucking rent?”

  She’s threatened to burn down the building before. Every time they fight. He’s even woken up soaked in it, the smell so thick it cured him of his boyhood love of huffing the stuff.

  He shows her his .38, pleased with the way her cigarettes sag in shock.

  “Hold on, baby, that’s what I’m trying to tell you,” he sighs. “It’s not this gun that makes me a man. It’s how many fish I got in my football.”

  “Huh?”

  “Do you have any idea how hard it was to get them here?”

  She starts to notice the blood and slowly sets down the gas can. He starts to notice her noticing the blood and slowly sets down his cookie jar. Then he’s suddenly rabbit-fucking her against their cleanest wall, and for a couple seconds loves her. When he’s done, his toes wiggle so hard he fears they’ll finally bust through his shoes. Then they both stare over each other’s shoulders as the feeling fades from love, to like, to hate, to indifference.

  At least I can’t get her any more pregnant, he thinks. Once they’re knocked up, it doesn’t have any effect anymore. Maybe each time we fuck, I change the baby’s eye color or something.

  “Go on,” she sighs. He looks at the clock. The craziest hour he’s ever had in his life.

  “Baby, you ever been on the toilet and all the sounds and sensations coming from your body seem to indicate that you’re taking a shit but then you look into the bowl and don’t see anything at all?”

  “No.”

  “Well, that’s our relationship.”

  “Out!” she screams, gas can back up and ready.

  “Wait! You misunderstand! You’re not listening, bitch! I’m saying that we’re ‘magic’!”

  His woman is flipping out, saying if his bullshit story is true, the money might dissolve, and she’s reaching for his fish. Again, he worries the $1,000 bill has never been in any of them.

  “Which one is it?!” she screams, splashing around the cookie jar with her yellow claw.

  When you get too many fish in your football, he thinks, you just have to pick one and stick with it. Now that’s something daddy should have said.

  “You know what?” he scoffs, moving for the door, pride wounded. “I take back every goddamn romantic thing I just said.”

  “Good!”

  Pick one and stick with it, he thinks. Maybe that’s what makes you a man. At least more man than cop. But not more man than goldfish.

  He takes one random fish and puts it in his pocket. He’s still got a minute left on the clock. So he runs across the hall to his other woman’s apartment, the one that’s less pregnant.

  * * * *

  He tells his other woman to stash one of his goldfish. She stands in the doorway, fish swimming around in the coffee cup propped on her belly. She hugs it tight. She’s stashed guns and drugs for Jack before, but this fish feels more important than them all. She puts it on top of her television, hoping he’ll pay her rent tonight so they won’t be evicted.

  Then he runs back across the hall to kill his first woman. His first woman, not his first woman. The first woman was cop number eight.

  He doesn’t take this lightly. He knows it would be wrong to compare it to the killing he’s already done. Sure, he’s learned many new ways to do it, but that was practice on one particular species. Woman is a whole ’nother animal.

  When he kicks open the door and sees what she’s doing, he knows he can do it.

  She has a pile of flopping goldfish on her ironing board, knife coming down when he hits her like a linebacker.

  “You can’t kill ’em! I already named ’em!” he pleads from the floor.

  “What fucking names?!” she hisses.

  “Cheddar, pretzel, corn, ranch, cinnamon, pizza, graham, parmesan, chocolate, baby …”

  She stabs him instead, stabs him again. He changes his mind about the fight real fast and decides to save as many fish as he can.

  Crawling for the bathroom, fish in his fists, pockets, and mouth, he hopes the last person in there remembered to flush. On his hands and knees, he realizes that he’d try to keep them all alive forever if he could and never look inside, just so he’d never know they were empty all along. But none of them are moving when she sticks him in the back where his spine used to be. Before his last breath, he attempts to give them a proper burial.

  He drops as many as he can in the bowl and pulls the lever as he falls. But they’re too big to go down. His head cracks the rim and the lights go out.

  * * * *

  He’s as surprised as anyone when he starts breathing again. He opens his eyes to see one fish in the bowl under his chin. It’s still swimming in circles.

  “Too big to flush, huh?” he asks it. “So am I.”

  He struggles to his feet, grabs the fish, snatches the glass football from his woman’s hands. As he’s running down the steps, he sees more goldfish in the corner of his eye still in the cookie jar. Jesus Christ, how many fish are there in the world?

  Outside in the intersection, the Amazing Andy is standing in the way no matter which way he chooses. He’s seen better days. Blue uniform now purple, black tie wrapped around his head covering the hole where an eye used to be. He holds his other .38 Special, of course, the grip wrapped in rubber bands so it can hide under a shirt against skin without slipping.

  “Back to nine.” Jack sighs, cocking the shotgun.

  During the fight, Jack soaks up three more bullets. Andy loses an ear and at least half his piano lessons along with the side of his head. When Andy’s gun starts clicking, Jack snaps as many fingers as he can so there’s no more tricks. Then he handcuffs him. Still struggling, Andy babbles about metal rings and handkerchiefs, and Jack spins one of his hands completely around, snapping it free from the burden of a wrist forever. It’s past 7:00. It’s overtime. It’s sudden death.

  “Bad move. The only thing I hate more than cops are magicians.”

  His own gun against the burger where his nose used to be, Jack pulls a tiny bag of goldfish crackers from his back pocket. Dangles them in Andy’s face.

  “Bet you can’t eat a hundred.”

  “Never said I could.”

  “Check out these flavors,” Jack says, reading the back of the bag. “Cheddar, pretzel, corn, ranch, cinnamon, pizza, graham, parmesan, chocolate, baby, and original. Makes your tongue curl, don’t it? Whoa, does that say, ‘baby’ flavor?”

  Forcing Andy’s mouth open with the barrel, he pours the bag into his maw. Only they’re not crackers. They’re goldfish. Real ones. He ran out of pockets a long time ago. He taps his temple with the gun to keep the bloody mouthful crunching and munching and crunching away.

  “Of all those flavors,” Jack muses, “It’s weird there’s no seafood. No actual ‘goldfish’ goldfish crackers. You know what other flavor they need?”

  “Murfg,” Andy bleats around a mouthful of fins.

  “Sweet Fucking Revenge.”

  Andy spits the pulp and scales to the street, trying to wipe his mouth with his shoulder.

  “I’m the one out for revenge, motherfuc
ker!” he shouts. “You shot me. I’m the unstoppable revenge machine in this equation!”

  “Consider yourself stopped,” Jack says, trying to curl his tongue to taste it.

  He pulls the trigger and really isn’t that surprised when it clicks. But he’s surprised when the clicks keep on coming from all directions.

  Jack turns around and around the four-way stop and sees the circle of blue and red, guns cocking, car doors popping. There’s .38 Specials and Remington 187s for everybody. He counts cop number 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, and 21. And 22.

  Jesus Christ, he laughs. How many cops are there in the world? And unless someone’s packing three hands, that’s two more hiding behind that car door. Penalty. One too many players on the field …

  He can’t believe no one blows a whistle.

  Standing in the intersection, black tar cooking his bare feet, he remembers how he used to play “connect the dots” with the white lines on the road, dragging a brush load of white paint (once a jar of mayonnaise) past any intersection where the lines stopped. He connected every road he could find, knowing that the black void was the only thing that made people stop, the sense of a drop-off into darkness. It was the void that made a normal person stop, not the red sign at all. He looks up, squinting as a streetlight flickers on bright as the sun, burning through every cop like an X-ray. Jack sees that they aren’t blue inside after all. Just gutless. He stands up taller than he thought possible, tucks the football under an arm, and lights a last cigarette. He wishes he could see this during a game. Last cigarettes, not the cops.

  Then his nostrils flare as he realizes his woman switched the water with gasoline.

  The fish are cooked white, no more gold, but he swears they’re still swimming, taking fuel into their gills and open mouths like sweet nectar.

  Touchdown. He spits his cigarette as he spikes the ball.

  Fire and fish fry everywhere.