Kill Me

by Stephen White

  “Not that it would have made any difference, right?”

  “In this case, who knows? Loyalty counts, too. But I think for the right price, Gaston could have been yours.”

  “What a fool I am,” I said.

  She didn’t argue with me.

  “Okay, then why? That’s the second question. Why did you help me?”

  “That’s none of your business. You get to decide whether or not to accept my help. You don’t get to demand to know why I offered it.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I’m not. Jesus,” she said, suddenly exasperated. “Think! I didn’t call you when you were up in my apartment alone. Right? You were wandering around to your heart’s content before the phone rang.”

  I tried to remember.

  She didn’t give me any time to organize the memories. She repeated, “Right? Right?”

  She was right. “No, you didn’t. You didn’t call me until things started to get crazy.”

  “I called you when Gaston called me to let me know that the boys were on their way up.”

  “Okay.”

  “I didn’t care that you were there. You could spend all day in there and not find anything significant about me. That’s the way I live. I called to warn you. That was all.”

  “Kindness?”

  “Call it what you want.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  I actually believed her, believed that she wasn’t sure.

  “Then I get a third question,” I said playfully. “Where are all the magazines you buy? I didn’t see one in your apartment. Not one.”

  She laughed, but to me the laugh sounded sad. Then she distracted me. “You saw my panties. My nice ones.”

  “I did.”

  “Don’t complain. They’re much more interesting than last month’s Vogue .”

  I had no advantage to exploit. None. I wasn’t accustomed to that state of affairs, and I didn’t like it. Then I remembered that I had one.

  Maybe.

  “The boss of the two men who came in? Military bearing. Wireless glasses. Cryptic. Seems like he could be explosive if you pressed the right buttons.”

  “Ted,” she said.

  “Code name?”

  “Of course.”

  “He was looking for something specific. The other one was looking for you. But Ted was looking for something he expected to find in your apartment that he couldn’t find.”

  That seemed to concern her. “Where was he looking?”

  “Your bedside table. The bathroom cupboards. The closet. The kitchen.”

  She frowned.

  “What was he looking for, Lizzie?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  She knew.

  I made a decision not to press her. Not then. I said, “In my head? When I think about all this? The introduction, the negotiations, the buy-in? The mess I’m in? I call you guys the Death Angels. Since I don’t know any real name for your organization, that’s what I use. You’re the Death Angels.”

  I looked back at Lizzie to gauge her reaction. The age lines at the corners of her eyes had softened. “We’ve been called worse, believe me. I like that, though. ‘Death Angels.’ Most of the time, it fits what we do. Most of the time, our clients are so grateful that there’s someone around who does what we do. We answer prayers. If disability is the devil, then we are their angels of death.”

  “But other times?”

  “Other times—and thankfully they are rare—there are people like you, people who end up wanting to bend the rules, or break them. People who wish they’d never met us, never signed up. When that happens people end up seeing us as more satanic than angelic.”

  “It’s too much to ask for some compassion at the end of one’s life?”

  “Our compassion is infinite, but it’s also totally inflexible. It has to be; it’s the nature of the beast. Our compassion takes only one form, the form that we describe at the beginning of the enlistment process. We make a delicate but profound commitment to our clients that is unwavering. The client may waver. We expect the client to waver. But even if the client stumbles, we are determined to finish what we’ve promised to finish. We keep our commitments.”

  “You guys are that ruthless? Everyone on your … team?” My questions were an awkward way of wondering aloud whether Lizzie was as ruthless as the rest of them. As Jeffrey, or the white-gloves guy, or the guy in the pickup in Ridgway, or the duo who busted into her apartment that afternoon. Ted and … whomever.

  “ ‘Ruthless’?” she said. “Ruthless. That’s a very a harsh word. Let’s compare it to, say, ‘reckless.’ Who’s to say which, ultimately, is the more damaging trait for a human being?”

  It was an intentional thrust with a sharpened saber and she’d hit her mark dead-on. She’d left me wounded. After I allowed myself a few seconds to absorb the blow, I discovered that, for the ensuing moments, I couldn’t breathe. I felt, too, as though drains had suddenly been opened wide in the arches of my feet and that all the blood was pouring from my body, emptying me of all that was essential.

  Lizzie was telling me she already knew all about what was going on with Adam.

  The most intimate things about Adam. And me.

  And Thea.

  I wasn’t so much surprised as I was realizing how desperately I didn’t want it to be true.

  “How?” I said.

  I didn’t have to say more. I didn’t have to ask her in a complete sentence. She knew what I meant.

  For a split second, I thought she was going to tell me. But her eyes grew rueful and I knew that she wasn’t.

  “You want to find your son before the end-of-life services are provided, right? I’m offering to help you.”

  “Why?”

  “ ‘How?’ ‘Why?’ You certainly ask a lot of useless questions for a big-shot entrepreneur. We don’t have much time.”

  “How much do we have?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. Not a lot,” she said. “But first, tell me something. Why just Adam? Why not your daughters? Your wife?”

  I didn’t have to think about how to reply. “Since I learned about the aneurysm, I’ve been with them constantly, every minute I could, and I’ve given them … more than I ever thought I was able. They’ve given me even more, of course.” I swallowed back tears. “If I die right now, I’m at peace with them. With Adam, I’m not.”

  Her eyes closed. Her shoulders slumped. “Well, we have work to do. But I’m dead tired. Which way is the bedroom?”

  I didn’t know what she meant by any of it. By the work part of it.

  By the bed part of it.

  I was realizing I didn’t know much.

  She was already asleep when I whispered into the dark room the question I’d been wondering about since I’d scooped her cell phone from its silk cradle in the underwear drawer in her Upper West Side closet.

  “Are you on my side, Lizzie?”

  FIFTY-TWO

  She was still asleep just before eight the next morning.

  I’d been awake for almost an hour and had already walked over to Pearl Street where I picked up some takeout food for breakfast, a few newspapers, and most important, some organic berries, and a large quantity of coffee.

  The tiny kitchen in my friend’s flat faced east and the morning light was brash and brilliant. In some soft, ironic homage to my aneurysm and to hyper-spiritual Boulder, I made a conscious effort to try to let the morning rays invigorate me and heal me in ways that had nothing to do with an infusion of vitamin D. Just in case that didn’t work, I guzzled coffee and forced myself to eat spoonfuls of yogurt that I didn’t really want. I also took a handful of pills that my various doctors had prescribed.

  Headaches had become a constant companion, but my nausea was under control for the moment. That was good. I knew I couldn’t count on the respite for long, but I was grateful for it while it lasted.

  I had arranged my growing collection of mobile p
hones—by then numbering three; Lizzie hadn’t asked for hers back—into a triangle on the counter in front of me after I’d methodically set them all to vibrate.

  The headlines of the local papers, along with a good proportion of their front pages, were focused on another apparent attack by the sniper who authorities feared was targeting travelers on Colorado’s main route into the mountains. This second shooting appeared to have been as random as the first. A twenty-eight-year-old woman, the mother of two, had been standing, or crouching, outside her car examining a flat tire on her Chrysler minivan at dusk on the eastbound shoulder of I-70 just west of Genesee.

  The location was familiar to anyone who made the drive from the urban communities along the Front Range into the Rocky Mountains. I-70 was the primary pathway to skiing, to hiking, to fishing. The section of the highway near Genesee was bordered on both sides of the interstate by woods. The steep, tree-lined slopes offered a hundred places for a resourceful sniper to set up a secret blind.

  The story in the paper was full of details. The slug had caught the victim in the neck, just under the chin. She’d died instantly. Although a few local residents reported to the investigators that they’d heard the retort of the shot echoing off the cliffs, no witnesses had come forward to point the authorities to any particular location in the narrow valley.

  At press time, the cops still hadn’t determined where the shot had originated, though they were focusing their efforts on the south side of the road.

  I made a mental note to talk with Thea about her plans for driving between Ridgway and Denver.

  As I dug into the sports section of The Denver Post, one of the cell phones, the “Ob-la-di,” began to dance around on the granite counter, announcing, “It’s me, it’s me!” Next to it, I noticed the red light on my BlackBerry was flashing. I had an e-mail.

  The caller ID screen identified the caller on the “Ob-la-di” phone: Mary. That was good. I wasn’t prepared to talk with Thea right then.

  “Hi, boss,” Mary said.

  Her voice was cool and unenthusiastic. Something else, too. The “something else” made me wary. “What’s up?” I asked. While I spoke, I thumbed the trackwheel to bring up the e-mail on the BlackBerry. The message was nothing but a Web link. I clicked on it. Something from Google News.

  Slowly, the page started to load.

  Mary said, “I just got a strange call from … you know, that … person we know with the old BMW bike. You with me?”

  What? Why is she talking like this about her cousin? Something had to be wrong. Seriously wrong.

  “Yes, I’m with you.”

  “Well, that person was just watching the local news thing on cable in the city. You’ve seen it?”

  “I know what it is.”

  TAXI DRIVER EXECUTED read the headline that was emerging on my BlackBerry.

  My eyes were riveted on the device in my left hand. Mary continued to speak into my ear. “Turns out that a cabdriver was murdered last night near the Hudson River up around 151st Street. It’s in West Harlem, an industrial area, the place Columbia’s considering for its second campus.”

  The details she provided about the neighborhood were Mary’s police background talking. I said, “Okay.” While I was listening to her I was simultaneously reading the same story on my BlackBerry, so I was prepared to hear what she said next.

  “The cops are calling his killing an execution, not a robbery. Single shot to the head, and they found a fat wad of bills still in his pocket. No attempt to hide his body. You had told me yesterday about that cabbie who was so nice to you, and I …”

  The fat wad of bills probably included two hundreds and a fifty with my fingerprints on them. The news Mary was imparting was monumental, of course, but I felt calm. Maybe too calm, I thought.

  “Did they give a name for the man who was killed?” The moment I asked Mary the question, the screen on the BlackBerry revealed Dmitri’s long Ukrainian last name. God.

  “The vic’s first name is the same first name as the name of the driver in the story you told me on the plane.”

  I tried to digest Dmitri’s tragedy for a moment and tried to understand what might have happened to him.

  The concierge at the Four Seasons—Jennifer, so-eager-to-assist-me, Morgan—knew the cabbie’s name and his cab number. How did she know? I’d told her. The doorman who handled the luggage exchange at the curb undoubtedly knew all about Dmitri, too. Anybody who had been watching my things being loaded into his cab from the sidewalk on 58th Street would have been able to see the cab number displayed so boldly on the ornament on top of his taxi.

  Dmitri could have been followed from that point on. Easily. First, back to the deli where I was waiting for him. Then over the bridge to Brooklyn to see where he’d dropped me off.

  From there, if they’d wanted to, they could have followed me on foot over to Julio’s bodega.

  But why would they kill him if they’d followed him and knew precisely where he’d gone?

  Why kill him if they did indeed trail me all the way to the bodega?

  There was only one conclusion: They must not have followed Dmitri from the hotel.

  No, they must have found Dmitri by backtracking. They’d used the information I’d provided to the concierge to track Dmitri down later so they could find out exactly where he’d taken the luggage, whether he’d reconnected with me, and if he had, where precisely he’d taken me next.

  Why?

  The night before, even before Lizzie’s arrival, the Death Angels knew I was back in Colorado. The only conclusion that made any sense was that they had decided to talk to Dmitri because they were trying to discover the identity of anyone who might be part of my support network in New York.

  I had to assume that Dmitri would have told them everything. In his shoes, I certainly would have.

  Then, to cover their tracks, the Death Angels had killed him. They’d made certain his body would be discovered. They had then sent me the e-mail announcing their work. Why?

  They wanted me to know what they had done.

  I said, “You know what you have to do next, Mary?”

  “Yes.”

  “Spare no expenses. None. Security comes first, for everyone you think might need it. Everyone. Err on the side of caution. All expenses will be reimbursed, but given the circumstances I don’t think you should use …”

  “Whose security comes first?” Lizzie asked from behind me.

  I covered the microphone. “It’s a business thing. Can you give me a second?” I faked a smile.

  She said, “Of course.” But she looked offended.

  She also looked sexy as hell. Her hair was flying every which way, her eyes were much brighter and clearer than they’d been the night before, and she was wrapped in the duvet that we’d slept under.

  Yes, slept. We’d just slept.

  She was holding three of the four corners of the duvet together under her chin. The skin on her exposed arms and shoulders was the shade of pale pink that illuminates the lowest clouds on the eastern horizon during those special sunrises that happen only one morning in a thousand.

  I waited until she’d retreated back into the bedroom and had closed the door behind her.

  “I understand,” Mary said, either ignoring the interruption or assuming I wouldn’t tell her anything about it. “Will you need it yourself?”

  She meant the plane. “Maybe, if I get word about Adam. But there’s no … no news yet. I’ll let you know. Take care of the other thing first. That’s your priority, okay? Family.”

  “Yeah. Family.”

  Was there sarcasm in her “Yeah”? Or irony? I couldn’t tell.

  She killed the call.

  FIFTY-THREE

  I stepped into the bedroom and leaned against the wall near the bathroom door. The drapes were still drawn from the night before and the room was dark and chilly. Lizzie was curled up on the bed, facing away from me, the duvet wrapping her as though she were the sliced apples inside a
crepe. She didn’t look toward me when she said, “If you want this to turn out for the best—for you, for Adam—you’re going to have to trust me. I know that’s not easy for you, but I’m not sure you have a choice.”

  I’d already decided to tell her what had happened to Dmitri. I’d start the trust thing there. “A cabdriver helped me get out of the city yesterday. He was a good guy. Last night, he was murdered up in West Harlem. Your friends sent me the news in an e-mail. A fucking e-mail.”

  My words tasted bitter from the guilt and anger I was feeling. My tone, I’m sure, conveyed any bitterness that my words lacked.

  After a long pause she sighed deeply, as though the air in her lungs was toxic and she had to expel every last molecule before she could continue. There was no surprise, no dismay, in her manner when she spoke.

  “Look, I’m sorry. I am. But you need to get some distance. Step back. It’s a message,” she said. “That’s all.”

  I raised my voice, and the intensity I forced into it shocked me. “That’s all? A message? Jesus Christ. He was a nice man, a generous man. He helped me. He trusted me. He was kind to me when I puked in the goddamn gutter. He was an immigrant trying to make a life for his family. A fucking message? The poor guy was brutally murdered.”

  She didn’t buy into my intensity. In a voice that a teacher might have used to explain long division to an arithmetically challenged pupil, she said, “He wasn’t murdered. He was executed. The difference is significant. They’re telling you not to seek any help. Not to spread suspicion or alarm. They’re announcing the consequences if you do.”

  “What?” I was shocked. I should have been beyond shock, but I wasn’t.

  I was shocked.

  “They’re making it clear that the end is coming. For you. They’re asking you not to hinder their work. Not to interfere. Not to risk others. Not to force them to risk others.”