After the game tonight I drove home thinking about McGrew. He looked familiar. Could mean he already had a sheet. But he didn't strike me as street tough, and judging by his speech, he'd spent at least a couple years in college. Maybe the Feds had tagged him. Before morning I intended to know everything about McGrew down to the color of his underwear, and somewhere along the way I'd figure out who he'd killed.
The same year I retired from the job my wife Connie died on a dark highway, in a sudden thunderstorm. Wind had knocked a dead tree across the road. Connie must've spotted the tree in her headlights about the same time she saw an eighteen-wheeler coming the other way. Nothing makes a cop feel more helpless than acts of God.
It had been Connie's idea to move out to the country, me grumbling all the way, but now I'm glad for it. Cuts down on visitors, and I like the privacy of having my nearest neighbors a mile away, where they never complain, no matter how loud I play old-time rock and roll. I have the original vinyl, but I've also converted them all to CDs. The country has its drawbacks, though, like frequent power outages and deer and rabbits ravaging the yard. Until last year I had to use a dial-up modem. Now I can get files faster at my home office than if I were still on the job. Can't say it's all strictly legal, but that's another advantage of being private.
At home, I sat in the semidarkness, a single lamp shining in the corner, and watched my computer sort through information while my mind did its own sorting. Since Connie's death I'd burned more garbage than in my entire career as a police officer, and the faces filed through my brain like a slide show. Murderers mostly, but also child molesters, rapists, and stupid, unintentional killers, who were sometimes the worst of the bunch. “Oh, Judge, I never meant to drink a fifth of Johnnie Walker and drive through that school zone.” This disposal work is another reason for keeping a low profile. I can just imagine Kevin's gee-wow-gosh surprise if he found out what I do on the side.
It's interesting how the public tends to demonize, or at best ignore, the people who do their dirty work. When hanging a killer was a noontime town event, with sodas and confections sold among a titillated audience, the hangman often wore a black hood to protect his identity. Now our executions are conducted at midnight behind layers of prosecutorial protection, the condemned gently put to death while already anesthetized by drugs. As always, the warden gives the nod, a doctor stands by to pronounce the death, but it's a nonentity who actually releases potassium chloride into the condemned's vein. Think about it—executioners, undertakers, garbage collectors—we need them but we don't want to know them.
I once burned a piece of garbage who was barely fifteen years old, and I'll admit it took every ounce of intestinal fortitude I could summon to pull that trigger. This boy, Mason, liked to beat things to a bloody pulp with his baseball bat. First, it was birds and rodents, then the neighbors’ pets. He'd bash them until there was nothing identifiable left and bury them in a field behind his parents’ garage. When a child in the neighborhood went missing, homicide eventually found Mason's animal burial ground and evidence of the child having been there. Officers on the job believed that Mason's parents had discovered the body and dumped it elsewhere, but nothing was ever proved. The bat was never found, either, which meant Mason wasn't even slated for juvie lockup. So I staked him out. For three months I lurked around the neighborhood, and finally I caught him at his new killing ground, behind a clump of yaupon bushes, cat in one hand and his new method of torture in the other, a flathead screwdriver. A quick bullet to the back of Mason's head made certain he wouldn't hurt another child, but I didn't arrive in time to save the cat.
Despite high-speed access, my research on Jake McGrew turned up squat. Lots of hits on the name, including some recent articles written by the “essayist” who came around to our poker games. Otherwise, nothing. No birth certificate, social, or driver's license that fit. Before six months ago—
"I don't exist."
The voice behind me froze my hand on the mouse and my thoughts on the holstered .9 mm hanging on the back of my chair.
Then he moved and I caught his reflection in the window clear enough to see the revolver pointed at my head.
"Fancy yourself some kind of equalizer, is that it, Bradshaw? Making up for the inadequacies of the failing justice system?"
"I knew you were wrong, McGrew. You reek of it."
"Uh-huh. Only I think it's your own life you're smelling. Stand up."
As close as he was, even a lame shooter could spatter my brains all over my laptop. I stood up slowly.
"Step away from your chair."
I did, and two seconds later he had my nine in his other hand.
"You must be hiding something pretty big,” I said, “to be worried about having me on your back."
Flashing that same cheesy smile I'd seen at the poker game, he said, “I'm not the one with reason to be worried here.” He dropped the nine into his pocket. “Have you figured it out yet? Who I am?"
I didn't answer, but the question had been eating at me the whole time he was talking, and I knew it showed in the curl of my hands.
"Face down on the floor."
By his tone, he might have been telling me to have a nice day. The Taurus .44 mag put an uglier spin on it. Still, I hesitated.
"You're going to die tonight, Bradshaw. The only choice you have is whether we start at your ankles and work our way up or make it an easy headshot."
I got down, first on my knees then to the floor, but I wanted to distract him from my left hand—my dominant hand, fortunately—and the floor lamp just beyond it.
"So who did you kill, sport?” I said, aiming my right index finger and cocking it like a pistol. “A girlfriend? A partner? Another essayist?"
"Sandra Louise Westin."
When his heel came down on my fingers, I knew he'd noticed the lamp, but the name threw me. Sandra Westin? The pieces didn't fit.
"Westin was a hit-and-run,” I said, clenching my teeth against the pain. Then it clicked. “He was your father."
"Yes, he was.” McGrew leaned his full weight into the shoe that was crushing my hand. I grunted and blinked sweat out of my eyes.
Sandra Westin had been killed by a fifty-two-year-old department store manager, Harold Belk, divorced twelve years. His son went to school at Texas A&M. Sandra Westin's Toyota sedan had been hit at a high-speed intersection. Afterward, it spun off the road and into a concrete post. A witness who missed seeing the actual impact but saw a car leaving the scene provided a description of the vehicle as well as four digits of the six-digit license number. Belk was picked up an hour later at a company Christmas party. He claimed he'd been at the party all evening, that someone must have hiked his car from the parking garage. But several people said he'd left the party for a while right after dinner. Although the officers working the case knew Belk was lying, Belk's lawyer made a convincing plea and the jury acquitted.
"It was an accident,” McGrew said.
Or rather, Jake Belk said.
The reason I hadn't placed his face before was because I'd never seen Harold's kid. He had his father's eyes, mouth, and chin, but Harold Belk was dead. Another piece of garbage disposed of.
"Your father lied. He went back to the party to establish an alibi—"
"He lied to protect me. I dropped him at his party that night and used the car to go to my own party. It was raining. This Toyota pushed through a red light and I couldn't stop in time. When I checked and saw she was dead, I panicked. I drove straight back to the parking garage and called my dad. He came out and I told him everything. He made me take a bus back to school, and even after his arrest, Dad wouldn't let me come forward. Said my age was against me, plus the fact that I'd left the scene. Said no one could prove he was driving the car, because he hadn't been, and anyway, it was an accident and ruining my whole life wouldn't bring Sandra Westin back.
"Dad was certain a jury would find him not guilty. And he was right. But then you come around. You convicted, sentenced, and executed
a man who never hurt anyone in his life."
Belk was squatting beside me now, down on one knee. The mag, steady in his hand, its muzzle at my right temple, would leave nothing but a bloody stump above my neck.
"Maybe you were a good cop once. Maybe you even eliminated a few monsters from the world when you first started playing Divine Reaper.” He bumped the cold muzzle against my skin. “Look at me."
I looked up into the face of a murderer and knew that I was his first kill.
"What goes around...” he said, and pulled the trigger.
Copyright (c) 2008 Chris Rogers
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Fiction: THE PROPER APPLICATION OF PRESSURE TO A WOUND by Sherry Decker
* * * *
Edward Kinsella III
* * * *
I was tempted to squat right there in front of God and everybody and piss on Jesse Frenault's grave—except I doubt God cares about things like that, and what the hell, all the other mourners were already gone. Unbuttoning my wool coat, lifting my long, black skirt, and peeling down my pantyhose would have been a struggle wasted on the squirrels.
The branches of a giant maple sheltered the new grave. The November winds had stripped most of the leaves already, but a steady trickle of amber leaves whirled and rustled down around me. It wouldn't be long before the grave was covered and the only thing to suggest the thoughtless old buzzard was buried there was his modest gravestone. I leaned forward, planning to spit on the arched marble, but couldn't work up enough saliva to even swallow, much less spit.
"You poor old fart,” I said. Another leaf brushed my shoulder and spiraled down to decorate more of the fresh, russet dirt.
After taking care of him for three straight years most days and nights, he didn't leave me a red cent. He left it all to his lazy ass son who had come home to visit him once during his last year on earth. His son's name was Vincent Reginald Frenault, and he spent more time following me around, accidentally stroking my rear, than spending time with his dying father. I felt like saying, “Here, dammit, Vincent, you hold your old man's sticky pecker while he takes a leak since you're so keen to help out.” Vincent would have fired me on the spot, though, and I needed the job. After being put on probation from the hospital for mouthing off to a doctor I was lucky to have a nursing job at all. I've made some sad decisions in my life.
* * * *
I had been in a sound sleep when Jesse's bell started clanging. I went tearing next door, zipping up the front of my robe as I ran, hopping from one foot to the other and pulling my slippers on over my heels. I found Jesse upright in bed, the first time he had sat up by himself in six months. It must have been sheer terror that gave him enough strength in those stick-thin arms and in his gnarled, age-spotted hands twisted by arthritis. He grabbed my arm as soon as I reached the side of his bed. His blind eyes were like mottled green grapes ready to burst from too much juice. I thought he was having a seizure by the way he jerked from side to side. Beneath his thin blue gown, open down the front, his rib cage heaved like a bellows.
I felt his bald head and clammy brow. “No fever. You in pain?"
"I can't...” he said. Almost a quart of blood shot from his toothless mouth like water from a fire hose, all over my arm and hand and the bedcovers. He toppled forward, his face landing in the gelatinous puddle on the bedspread. I lifted his head and saw thick yellow mucous bubble from both nostrils. Blood and mucous make me queasy—a bizarre flaw for a nurse. I often wonder, what's in those lumps and smears? I half expected to see something moving in that puddle.
I pulled him back on his pillows and dialed 911 even though I knew he was dead. Vincent slept through it all.
* * * *
Jesse was more pathetic than hateful, so I'm glad I didn't squat on his grave. It's just that I was counting on him to leave me something in his will, considering all the care I gave him. He said I was the best nurse he'd ever had and that I was “quite outspoken.” Or, did he say I was “awfully free with my opinion"? Anyway, he liked me to read to him at bedtime. I didn't mind. It felt good to look up every page or so and see him resting on his pile of pillows with his clean face and hair and his clean bedding. I bathed him every evening after dinner and slid him between fresh laundered sheets. It was the only time he didn't smell like a shitty diaper or like a moldy old refrigerator hauled off and left at the garbage dump. Old refrigerators have their own unique smell, as if forty years of curdled milk, rancid meat, moldy fruit, and cheese had permeated their walls. A person can scrub until she is exhausted and the refrigerator walls are raw from her scouring, but that stink hangs on. Jesse smelled like that, like an old, moldy refrigerator, propped up and abandoned at the garbage dump.
"You're welcome to stay on,” Vincent told me the morning the coroner picked up his father's body.
"For what?"
"I might need some tender loving care once in a while.” Vincent sounded quite serious, but the expression on his face made me want to jam my palm up against the end of his nose real hard, driving the nasal bone into his frontal lobes. A lobotomy, compliments of the private nurse.
Instead, I picked up my medical bag and my suitcase and headed for the door.
"Let me know if you change your mind,” he called after me.
One year earlier I would have shouted something appropriate over my shoulder, but I've learned from my unhappy experience at the hospital that saying nothing demonstrates restraint and it leaves them wondering what you would have said if they were worth the spit and air it takes to say it.
Hospital Special Services added my name to their list again and promised to call as soon as they found something “fitting."
"If possible, no terminal cases this time please,” I said.
The counselor nodded and then shook her head. Everybody wants the same thing, a patient who isn't dying. We all want someone who will get well or at least stabilize.
"I'll call as soon as we do a needs-comparison,” she said. That meant she would scrape the bottom of the barrel before she found something for me.
Three of my patients died during my last month at the hospital. One of them was a middle-aged woman in the final stages of cancer, so her death wasn't unexpected. She just slipped away while I held her hand. One minute there was the light of life in her eyes, a look of awareness, resignation, peace, and a moment later she was gone. She didn't blink or look away. She faded out, like a flashlight with a weak battery.
There was an eight-year-old boy who had found his father's loaded target pistol and shot himself right through the ears. He looked fine, like we could wipe off the blood and plug the holes with cotton swabs where his inner ears had been and send him home. I squeezed his mother's hand as he took his last breath. Her knees gave way and I caught her before she hit the floor.
I've always heard that doctors and nurses make the worst patients. It's true. Dr. Everson was in his mid forties and as healthy looking as any athlete.
Rumor had it, one day he discovered a lump on his knee. He didn't wait for the test results. Instead, he entered and locked the door of an examination room and injected himself with a syringe full of air while I banged on the door and peered through a gap in the blinds. The emergency team broke the glass and unlocked the door, but they failed to revive him. He died alone in the stark room beneath a faulty overhead light flickering off and on. Not the kind of place I would choose to end it all.
* * * *
My checkbook was screaming to be fed it when my final paycheck from the Frenault estate arrived, barely enough to pay my bills and buy groceries. I didn't buy much at the Thrift-Mart, though. After someone dies in my care I tend to lose my appetite for a while. But since I was there, I bought a pound of whole coffee beans, a quart of milk, and a bag of raisin bagels and stashed them in my empty refrigerator. I had taken so many meals at the Frenault estate my refrigerator had developed that abandoned smell, and it reminded me of Jesse, so I scrubbed it with baking soda and hot water while shuddering and holdin
g back memories of blood and mucous.
It had been months since I had enjoyed a walk and I headed for town, hoping to elevate my mood. I couldn't afford to buy anything. I forgot my scarf and gloves so I shoved my numb hands into my coat pockets. It was just above freezing, cloudy and blustery. Hardly uplifting.
Leisure time affords the opportunity to see and hear things one doesn't want to remember later: an old married couple arguing over whom is too blind to drive, a young couple fighting about money, an impatient mother scolding her toddler. Someday she'll pray he's forgotten what she said.
"You're a brat. I should spank you right here where everyone can see! Stop crying! I don't want an ugly, bawling kid with me."
I'd never say things like that to my child. I was married once. Pregnant.
In the middle of town was a corner pharmacy. It had a window display of blood-pressure cuffs. I stood there, comparing price and features, reminded of Jesse Frenault. Behind me, brakes screeched, followed by an awful, double-thump. A man shouted. People raced by me into the intersection.
From inside the open door of the drugstore, someone shouted, “Call 911. Pedestrian hit by a car!” The pharmacist rounded the end of the counter and ran out the door and into the street.
I pushed my way into the crowd behind him. “Let me through. I'm a nurse."
The pharmacist was already there, kneeling beside a little girl on the cold, damp street. She looked to be about six years old and bled from a deep gash on her thigh. A jagged bone protruded through the torn flesh. A blue lump swelled on her brow.
"My baby,” a man moaned. “Someone, help!"
Ten feet away the gleaming bumper of a silver Mercedes hummed. No dents, no blood, no sign of colliding with the child. I wondered how the car had managed to miss a big, hefty guy like the father and mow down a tiny girl.
I knelt alongside the pharmacist, “I'm a registered nurse,” I said. He nodded, his face as gray as the pavement. I placed my hand over the girl's wound and pressed, staunching the flow of blood. A siren wailed from the fire station six blocks away.
AHMM, December 2008 Page 7