“Self-defense, Josh,” Hector said. “Him or you.”
“Yeah.”
“He fired at you. If he’d hit you, you’d be the one in the ambulance.”
I looked over to the wall behind my desk. At approximately chest level, Paul Chang’s slug had pocked a ragged hole in the plaster. One of the uniforms had used a penknife to pry it out of the adobe beyond.
“Yeah,” I said.
Hector said nothing.
The telephone rang.
It had been Rita calling before, when the ringing phone had distracted Paul Chang. I hadn’t answered it because I was busy kicking the Colt away from the doorway, where he’d dropped it when he crumpled to the floor. I’d heard her voice coming through the answering machine as I ripped clumps of Kleenex from the box and stuffed them into Chang’s wounds, one just above his hip on the right side, the other in his right shoulder. I couldn’t recall shooting at him twice. I had been moving when I fired, heading for the floor.
Lying there, he had been in shock, his eyelids fluttering. I had mumbled the entire time I worked on him, calling him a stupid shit, telling him that everything was going to be fine, calling him a stupid shit again. Probably, even if he’d been able to understand me, I wouldn’t have made much sense.
The phone was still ringing. I got up, shuffled over to the desk, lifted the receiver. “Hello?”
“Joshua?” Rita. “You sound strange.”
“Yeah. Well, there’s been kind of an accident here.”
“What kind of an accident?”
“Paul Chang. I kind of shot him.” I giggled. It sounded inappropriate, even to me.
After a moment Rita said, “You’re all right?”
“Just swell. Hunky dory. Never felt better.”
“Is anyone there with you?”
“Hector.”
Another brief pause. “Joshua? May I talk to him?”
“Yeah, sure.” I held out the phone to Hector. “Lovely Rita.”
Hector stood, crossed the room, took the phone. “Hello, Rita.”
I circled the desk, sat down in the swivel chair, slumped myself against the backrest.
“Yeah,” Hector spoke into the phone. “He’s fine … No … Yeah … They say he’ll live … I don’t know. Not well … No, nothing like that … Yeah … Yeah, I will … I will, Rita, I promise … Okay, I’ll tell him … You too. Okay. Later.”
He hung up. “Okay,” he said to me. “Let’s go.”
I looked up at him. “Where?”
“I’m taking you home.”
“Jesus Christ, Hector. I shot the guy, nearly killed him. If nothing else, I fired a gun inside the city limits. Don’t I at least get a ticket?”
“You were on your own property, protecting yourself. All the evidence corroborates your story. We’ve got his gun, we’ve got the slug he fired. We’ve got your statement. Anything comes up, I’ll let you know. Meanwhile, I promised Rita I’d drive you home. She’ll get there as soon as she can. An hour or two, she said. Let’s go.”
I shook my head. “I can’t, Hector. Got to clean that up.” I nodded to the doorway, to the smeared puddle of blood.
“Rita said you’d say that. She’s calling the service. They’ll take care of it. Come on. I’ll drive you.”
“We’ll take my car?”
He shook his head. “Mine. Yours will be fine where it is.”
Suddenly I was too tired to argue about it. Too tired to argue about anything.
Hector and I didn’t speak much as he drove me home. But in my driveway, just as he stopped the car, he turned to me. “Joshua,” he said. “I know how you feel.”
I nodded. He probably did. But somehow that didn’t seem to matter much.
He said, “There are a few things you should remember. First of all, he’s still alive.”
“So far.”
“Second, like I said before, if you hadn’t nailed him, you’d probably be dead right now.”
I shook my head. “We don’t know that, Hector. He wanted to take me somewhere. I hurt him pretty badly yesterday. Maybe all he wanted was another shot at the title.”
“If he didn’t plan to use the gun, he should never have pulled it.”
I shook my head. “I keep seeing his face. He looked so goddamned surprised.”
“He wasn’t the one who was supposed to get shot.” He reached out, squeezed my arm, released it. “Don’t punish yourself, Josh. And listen. Call me if you want to talk.”
I looked at him. He had been something like a friend for a long time now, as much like a friend as any cop could be to a private investigator. He was big and he was genuinely tough and he looked about as sensitive as a set of brass knuckles. I knew that there were cops—not many of them, thank God—who wouldn’t be at all bothered by the idea of shooting someone. And who would never understand why I’d be bothered by the idea of shooting someone.
There were things I wanted to tell him, but they were things that didn’t easily come out of male vocal cords. Out of my vocal cords, anyway. What I said was, “Thanks, Hector.”
I wandered around the house for a while, aimlessly, moving things, picking them up, setting them down. I’d been sleeping at Rita’s almost every night for the past month or so, coming here only for a change of clothes. The rooms felt unused and abandoned. So did I.
When I looked at my watch, I saw that it was already three o’clock. Paul Chang had entered my office just before one. Time flies when you’re having fun.
I went into the kitchen, found the Jack Daniel’s, built a drink, carried it into the living room, sat down. Tasted the drink. Noticed, on the folded-back cuff of my denim shirt, a large dark brown smear.
I put the drink on the coffee table. I stood up, ripped the shirt off, tossed it across the room, stalked into the bathroom, and was extremely sick.
It seemed like a long time that I sat there on the sofa, drinking, thinking.
I had killed two human beings in my life, a pair of thugs from El Paso. They had tortured and killed a defenseless old man; and, at the time, on a dusty mountainside in Arizona, they had been trying very hard to kill me. If any two people had ever deserved to die, I believe that they had. But I still had dreams about them. Bad dreams.
When medieval cartographers drew the Atlantic Ocean, they often scrawled a notation across the blank unknown area beyond the Azores: Here be monsters. Today’s cartographers could, with more accuracy, scrawl it across the entire globe. The monsters are everywhere now. They are ruthless and they are unredeemable. Captured, imprisoned, they are almost certainly not going to be rehabilitated. Whatever lethal combination of gene and scene created them, they are damaged beyond repair.
I can understand the arguments for capital punishment. I can understand the thirst for revenge. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Destroy the destroyer. It’s pretty basic stuff.
But, maybe because the thirst is so basic, I tend to distrust it. Too often, I suspect, what we wish to destroy is just a handy screen onto which we project the psychic ghosts shaped by the bitterness and the brutality we’ve all suffered, our own private devils and demons. You can sometimes see this on the faces of those ghouls who stand vigil outside the prison when an execution is about to take place. What shows in their eyes, in the set of their mouths, isn’t compassion for the prisoner’s victims, but lust for the blood of the prisoner. When we destroy the destroyer, murder the murderer, collectively we reduce ourselves to his level.
Was Paul Chang a monster? I didn’t know. Did he deserve to die? I wasn’t equipped to provide an answer. I didn’t think that anyone was.
If someone were threatening Rita’s life, without a moment’s thought I would do everything I could to stop him. Paul Chang had threatened mine, and without a moment’s thought I had stopped him. No doubt, in a similar situation, I would do so again.
But that didn’t mean that I had to like it. And it didn’t mean that I could forget what I’d done. Over and over as I sat there that afte
rnoon, I saw the look on Paul Chang’s face as the slugs from the .38 slammed into his flesh. Saw the red blood seeping down the lining of his leather jacket and soaking into the carpet …
The doorbell rang at four-thirty. With an effort—alcohol and exhaustion and damaged muscles slowed me down—I stood up and walked to the door. For all I knew, the person standing outside could be Veronica Chang, come to finish what her brother had started. I didn’t even bother to peer through the peephole.
It was Rita. She stood there for a moment, looking at me. Then she said merely, “Joshua.” Her voice was soft.
“Hey, Rita. Come on in.”
She came in. Over the outfit she had been wearing this morning, she wore now a different coat, tan leather, three-quarter length.
“New coat?” I said.
She nodded, her face solemn.
“Nice,” I said.
“Thank you.” She started to take it off, and I moved to help her.
“Here,” I said, and slipped it from her shoulders. She turned to face me, her large dark eyes staring up at me, and I stood there holding the coat, looking down at her.
She put the palm of her right hand against my cheek. “Joshua,” she said. Her face was even more solemn now, almost tragic.
I tried a smile. It wouldn’t stay in place. I took a deep breath, let it out. “Jesus, Rita,” I said. “It’s been a hell of a day.”
Her hand slipped from my cheek to the back of my neck and I bent down toward her as her left hand came around to my back, and then I was tightly up against her, breathing the familiar smell of her hair and the new-leather smell of her coat, and I was sobbing like a baby.
Maybe I believed, at least at the beginning, that I was crying for Paul Chang and what I’d done to him. But grief, for good or for ill, finally isn’t concerned with other people. In the end, we all cry for ourselves.
Rita and I didn’t talk for a long time. I couldn’t have talked if I’d wanted to.
I don’t know how we got into the bedroom. I don’t remember. But somehow we did, and then somehow, after a time, we were joined together once again in that miracle which, perhaps out of terror at its mysteries, we often make banal and commonplace: two isolate beings stripped of their day-to-day identities, their masks, their costumes, as naked before each other as sacrificial victims, or as gods.
“Joshua?”
“Hmmm?”
“Have you called the hospital?”
“No,” I said.
We were lying on my bed, me on my back, Rita on her side, her head on my shoulder, her hand on my chest.
“Shall I call?” she asked.
“They won’t tell you anything.”
“Hector may know what’s happening.”
“Yeah.”
“Will he be home?”
“Probably.”
“Shall I?”
I breathed in deeply. Breathed out deeply. Nodded. “Yeah.”
She turned slightly, kissed my arm, then gracefully rolled away to reach the phone on the nightstand. Supporting herself on her elbow, she picked up the receiver, dialed the number. I turned to her, reached out my left hand and ran my index finger lightly down the knuckles of her spine. At the small of her back, just to the right of the delicate ridge of bone, was the round puckered white scar left by the bullet that had left her paralyzed for nearly three years. Another inch over, and Rita would still be in the wheelchair today, would be in it forever …
“Hello, Hector … Yes … He’s fine … Yes. Have you heard anything?… Good … Good … Thank you, Hector … Yes. You, too … Soon, yes. Bye.”
She hung up the phone, rolled back to me. “You heard?”
“Yeah. He’s all right?”
“He’s stabilized. Serious but not critical. No major organs damaged. Barring complications, he’ll be fine.”
I let out another breath. I nodded. “Okay. Thanks.” I kissed her forehead. “And thanks for coming here. Thanks for being here.”
She smiled. “What are friends for?”
I kissed her again.
She put her head against my shoulder once again. “It doesn’t make much sense, does it?”
“Which?”
“Paul Chang, trying to kill you.”
I shrugged. “Maybe he wasn’t. This time. Maybe this time, like I told Hector, he wanted the two of us to go off somewhere for a rematch. But I don’t think that was what he had in mind last night.”
“If that was Paul Chang last night, driving the truck.”
“Who else could it have been?”
“You’d rather it was Paul Chang, wouldn’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“Shooting him would seem more justified.”
“Yeah.”
“He had a gun, Joshua.”
“I know.”
“You had to operate on the assumption that he was prepared to use it. And he did.”
“Yeah.”
She turned and kissed my shoulder again. “Do you want to take some time off?”
“Can’t. Not now.” I turned to her. “What did you have in mind?”
“Cancun.”
“Cancun?” I grinned. “You’re serious?”
She smiled. “For a week or so. You’re always talking about lying on the beach down there. Let’s do it.”
“Yeah?”
Another smile. “Yeah.”
I kissed her forehead. “Okay. Cancun. A week. That’s a good idea. That’s a very good idea. But I’ve got to wrap this up first.”
“Yes.” Her hand moved down my chest, down my stomach. “A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do.”
“Bet your ass.”
She laughed softly against my neck. “You’re such a fraud.”
“Oh yeah? How?”
“You know how. It’s what I was talking about last night, in the hospital. You like to act so tough and self-reliant—”
“And you think I’m not?”
“Self-absorbed, perhaps.”
“Self-absorbed? Hey—”
“When you’re working on something. You are, Joshua. And I don’t believe, basically, that it’s a bad thing. Although it’s sometimes a little difficult to live with. Joshua, you know that I think you’re a good man. And a lot more sensitive than you like to pretend.”
“It’s important to be sensitive. All the chicks really dig it. Ouch!”
Her laughter was less soft. It was a lewd chuckle, low in her throat.
“Shit,” I said. “You shouldn’t do that, Rita. You could cause a serious sexual malfunction.”
Another chuckle. “Let’s see if I have, shall we?”
“So just why did you go down to Albuquerque?” I asked her. Both of us were lying on our backs now. Idly, slowly, I was stroking her thigh with the back of my hand.
“Some things I had to take care of,” she said.
“Business?”
“Some of it.”
“What was the rest?”
“A candlelit tryst with a wealthy Italian count.”
“Oh.” I turned toward her. “Does he have a sister? A countette?”
She smiled. “Do you really want to know my major reason for going down there?”
“Yeah.”
“Clothes.”
“Clothes?”
“Clothes. Joshua, I haven’t been shopping for over three years.”
“Maria went shopping for you.” Maria had been her housekeeper and companion. “And I could’ve gone. Anytime. All you had to do was ask.” I realized, as soon as I heard the words, how silly they sounded.
So, evidently, did Rita. She laughed. “Joshua, your idea of shopping is running into K-Mart and grabbing a pair of jeans.”
“Excuse me? Are you suggesting that I’m less than sartorially splendid at all times?”
“Of course not. Right now, in fact, I think you look very dashing. And I think that, generally, you pull off the Urban Cowboy look rather well. It’s just that I’d rather shop for myself.
And I badly needed some new things.”
“Urban Cowboy? That leather jacket of mine is an Armani.”
She laughed again. “Was I saying something earlier about your being self-absorbed?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t listening.”
Another laugh.
“Why Albuquerque?” I asked her.
“There are more stores down there, and the prices are better. And it was fun, Joshua. I went to Coronado Mall. Do you know how many stores there are in Coronado Mall?”
“Three?”
“Hundreds. It was a true adventure in shopping.”
I rolled over, up onto my elbow, to look at her. I smiled. “This is a side of you I’ve never seen before, Rita.”
She smiled. “I imagine that you’ll see more of it.”
“I bought something today, too, as a matter of fact.”
“What?”
“A car. A Jeep Cherokee.”
She frowned. “I didn’t see it outside.”
“It’s down in the lot behind the office. Hector drove me home.”
Smiling, she put her hand on my shoulder. “Poor Joshua. You haven’t had much of a chance to play with it, have you?”
“I’ll play with it later.”
“It’s a nice car?”
“It’s a sweetheart.”
Another smile. “Aren’t you being a bit fickle? The Subaru isn’t even in its grave yet.”
“Guy’s gotta have a car. Oh damn,” I said suddenly.
She looked at me, frowned. “What?”
“What an idiot I am. You had to come back from Albuquerque. Because of me.”
She smiled. “I don’t regret it.”
With my right hand, I brushed the hair from her forehead. “You can go back down there again. Tomorrow.”
She smiled again. “I plan to.”
“My goodness. What on earth happened to your neck?”
“An automobile accident.”
“How terrible.”
Carol Masters lightly put a hand, heavy with ornate rings, to her own neck. Both the hand and the neck were thin and corded, their skin leathery. Her bright shiny red fingernails were long enough and sharp enough to slice luncheon meat. Several pounds of jewelry were draped around the neck, links of gold and silver and beads of coral and turquoise. Whenever she moved, she clicked and clattered slightly, like a pocketful of change.
The Hanged Man Page 19