Kill Me

by Stephen White

I braked heard before I downshifted.

  Will the drum hit just in front of the car? Right on top? On the sloping back deck that covers the engine?

  I could only guess.

  The other cars and trucks on that steep downhill stretch of I-70? It was impossible to calculate what they would do.

  Should I brake more? Accelerate? Swerve?

  The swerve option was especially dicey: On my left, a hard-braking Chrysler minivan packed full of people had squeezed onto the narrow ribbon of pavement between my car and the Jersey barrier that separated the downhill lanes from the uphill lanes. On my right, a ridiculously large SUV blocked any escape fantasy I might have that would take me in that direction.

  The barrel with my name on it seemed to hang in the air, waiting for me to make my move.

  Acceleration was an especially tempting option. I was on a steep downhill grade; gravity would provide a welcome boost. One quick upshift, followed by a sharp thrust at the accelerator pedal and the Porsche would gleefully do the rest, jumping at my command to gallop. She would love it. Love it.

  But I didn’t goose the gas. I braked. Why?

  Because I’d gone into automatic. I was no longer driving. I was skiing, and every instinct told me I had to feather an edge and control my speed if I was going to have a prayer of keeping both boards on the same side of every tree.

  Instantly, as I braked, the minivan and the SUV jumped ahead of me. I felt that I had only a split second to maneuver away from the descending arc of the falling drum’s trajectory. I had just started to turn the wheel right to start my escape when I felt a firm impact on the right-rear quarter of the car.

  The barrel? Have I just been hit?

  No, the black drum was still airborne.

  As my tires yielded to the unexpected force on the rear end by relinquishing their grip on the pavement, the Porsche began to ease into a spin. I realized that I’d just been clipped by a car that I hadn’t even seen coming up behind me.

  Careless. Shit.

  Watching the barrel with my name on it bounce harmlessly past my car, I wondered if the German girl could endure a spin at those speeds and still keep her four rubber pads on the road.

  The barrel passing by was the good news.

  The bad news? I was watching the tumbling drum buffet past me out of my windshield—and not in my mirrors—which meant that for that instant, at least, my German chariot was pointed back uphill, which wasn’t the direction I’d been driving a split second before.

  I could feel the g-force from the continued sideways pull of the spin. The Porsche’s paws weren’t finding traction. I knew if she didn’t find some connection with the planet soon, I was going to crash into something, or the German girl and I were going to roll.

  Or both.

  I thought, Thea would consider this reckless .

  No doubt about it.

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  Saying good-bye to Thea and the girls up in Ridgway was like draining the life out of my soul with a high-capacity sump. The extended farewell sucked at my spirit until the density of what was left inside me made every step I took heavy and clumsy. I was an elephant trying to climb a tree.

  I did the au revoirs bit by bit over the course of about twenty-four hours. The whole time, of course, I had to pretend that I wasn’t doing it at all.

  Not surprisingly Thea saw something in my manner that raised red flags for her. “Did you get some bad news about your health? Something new you’re not telling me?” she asked me gently. When I said no, she grabbed me—grabbed me—her strong hands squeezing into the muscles of my biceps, and she demanded, “Are you sure? Tell me.”

  Tell me? Her eyes pierced my facade. I could feel the intensity of their power cutting like lasers into the dura lining the back side of my skull.

  “I’m sure,” I said.

  Sure of nothing, I thought.

  “Why are you so … ?” she asked.

  “Why am I so … what?” I replied.

  “Something is going on,” she said. “You’re not … You’re too … cuddly. Is it Adam?”

  “I haven’t found him. I need to find him, babe.”

  She softened her voice as she said, “I know. You seem … sad, I think.”

  Does she know? How could she? I wondered.

  I’d convinced myself that I was hiding all the pathos I was feeling. It disarmed me that she saw it. “Maybe,” I said. “One of these days will be the last day I see you. And Cal and Haven.”

  “You’ve been a great father,” she said. Thea knew my self-doubts, or at least most of them.

  “A better father than we worried I would be,” I said with a little whimsy in my voice. “The girls have made it easy, but Adam’s been a challenge. I need to find him before—”

  “I know,” she said again.

  Does she know?

  I decided that she couldn’t know, and that she was interpreting my sadness as some form of self-pity about my health, or about my missing son, and I let her think it. Because even if it wasn’t honest, it was true.

  “It’s hard,” I tried, aware it was a deflection.

  “When you’re gone,” she said. “If that’s how it ends—”

  Does she know? “I’m not—”

  “Shhhh,” she said. “Listen. When you’re gone, when the time comes, promise me you’ll visit me in my dreams. That you’ll hold me while I sleep. That you’ll make me strong enough to be everything for the girls.”

  “And Adam,” I said.

  “And Adam,” she said.

  I wanted to tell her she was the strongest person I knew. Instead, I said, “I promise.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know you’re not going to die tomorrow, but …” Tears were welling in the corners of her eyes. “I’m going to need an angel. I will. I’m so, so sorry to be selfish right now, but”—she sobbed so hard she shook—“I’m not as strong as you are, I guess.”

  If she only knew how much stronger than me she was.

  I left all the misperceptions floating in the air between us. I felt like the fraud I was.

  FIFTY-NINE

  What I’d thought I was buying from the Death Angels was peace of mind. It had seemed like a reasonable bargain at the time. I was agreeing to trade a few sick-but-ambulatory days for a promise that I wouldn’t have to endure endless days when illness or injury had robbed me of the vitality that I was convinced was so essential to my well-being. My rationalization was a simple one—that I’d rather die a few days too soon than months or years too late.

  What I didn’t realize at the time was that I was blindly giving up a few other important things in the deal.

  Hope, for instance. I was giving up hope.

  Not hope in any infinite lifesaving sense, not hope that science would prevail, or hope that prayer would yield a miracle and that the inexorable flow of my illness would have its path to the final sea altered by intervention from fate, or from one of the idols we include on the roster of deities that we call God.

  What I was giving up instead was hope in its purest, most basic form. Hope that I might have one more good day, or one more good hour, or one more intimate meal, or even one last shared smile with Cal and Haven, one more night where I was still strong enough to lie under a layer of down and hold my wife, and comfort her, and be comforted by her.

  One embrace with my distant son.

  I was giving up hope that the next night I would still be able to see the stars or the next morning I would still be able to gaze upon the sunrise. Hope that I could have one more day surrounded by family photos that yanked me through time to memories that made my laugh and made me cry and made me grateful for every hour I’d spent on the planet.

  Instead of buying peace of mind, it turned out that I’d paid the Death Angels millions of dollars for a dose of fear that shook molecules I didn’t even know were part of me.

  Fear of death, yes. Ironically, the thought of dying had never before been one of my paralyzing fears.


  But even worse, I had begun to fear dying before I had to.

  Had to.

  For years—how many? I don’t even know—I’d been allowing myself to subscribe to the absurd, preposterous notion that the value of my life was defined by what I did with it. I had somehow convinced myself that to be truly alive I had to be always stretching a rubber band to its breaking point.

  I’d somehow mixed up recreation with living.

  God, the absurdity. The irony.

  I wasn’t totally naive about the choices I’d made as a young man, but in recent years I’d been living under the delusion that although I’d grown up late—sometime in my mid to late thirties—I had grown up.

  That day of good-byes in Ridgway with Thea and Berk and Haven, and with a clear view of the future with them I’d never know, I realized I hadn’t really begun to grow up until I knew that dying was inevitable and until I accepted the consequences of hiring someone to kill me.

  Not once while I was silently saying good-bye to the girls that I loved, my death certainly imminent, did I feel the slightest remorse about the grand adventures I would miss by dying young. All my regrets were about missing Thea and Berkeley and Haven—and yes, Adam—and about not being part of their futures.

  What a fucking shame.

  What a fucking idiot I am.

  The Porsche was parked on the far left side of the big garage in Ridgway. The damage to the driver’s side wasn’t visible unless someone had a reason to be on the left side of the car. Thea didn’t. She wasn’t fond of the old sports car and her big SUV was on the opposite side of the garage in the spot closest to the mudroom door. My old German mistress was drivable, but she looked like she had endured a very bad day at Talladega.

  I never told Thea about the drama with the flatbed truck on I-70.

  After I’d been clipped from behind while trying to avoid that flying black drum—the one I was sure had my name on it—and I was spinning on that steep hill on I-70, I could feel, just feel, the German girl struggling to keep her four feet on the ground. We endured another hundred fifty degrees of rotation—I was almost pointed back downhill by then—before I knew that the two tires on the passenger side had started to laugh at gravity and float above the concrete. Not by much. They were maybe a few millimeters above the pavement, maybe a centimeter.

  But they were floating—I could feel it—and whatever illusion of control I had was disappearing along with the rubber’s contact with the earth.

  Not much, I kept telling myself. Only some silly millimeters, okay, maybe a centimeter, or two. She’ll fall back down. She will.

  But she didn’t.

  And I didn’t see the Jersey barrier coming up fast on my left until I hit it. My attention was turned to the right toward those levitating tires, and toward another barrel that was bouncing off the back of the damn flatbed. The Porsche smacked into that sloped concrete divider hard, cinching me against my shoulder belt, showering the air with sparks, and filling my ears with the sounds of scraping and crunching metal.

  The lucky part, in retrospect, was that I didn’t hit the barrier at an angle. The impact with the low concrete wall came just at the precise point that the Porsche was aimed straight back downhill, and she absorbed the blow evenly along the sheet metal on the length of her left side. The sudden concussion with an immovable barrier stopped the car from spinning any farther.

  The unlucky part? The impact with the angled cement wall caused the German girl’s right tires to lift even higher off the pavement. Almost before my brain could make sense of what was happening, those bare centimeters of levitation became a foot, and the foot became two. My mind jumped ahead and I actually pictured what would happen next as those wheels continued to lift and the Porsche and I rolled over the top of the barrier into the oncoming uphill traffic. Instantly, I saw myself upside down, looking out the spider-web glass of the broken windshield, examining for a millisecond the undercarriage of whatever vehicle fate had selected to be the one that was going to kill me.

  Instantly.

  But the Porsche didn’t roll any farther. The feet of elevation of those right wheels became twenty inches, not thirty. Ever so slowly, the twenty inches became ten. With a deep thud and a jarring bounce, the ten inches suddenly became none.

  We were back on the ground, and I felt a sudden assurance, an innate confidence that I knew this terrain: All I had to do to survive this hellacious conflagration was to ski through the remaining trees in front of me, and keep both boards on the same side of every trunk.

  Instinct took over and I found third gear, steered away from the Jersey barrier, adroitly dodged a bouncing barrel, did a graceful slalom through a trio of demolished cars, squealed the tires in a desperate maneuver to squeeze between one of the two eighteen-wheelers and a spinning Subaru, and in seconds the German girl and I were in the clear, braking hard just in time to finesse the nearly ninety-degree left turn at the bottom of the hill.

  While I was doing that desperate, instinctive slalom I was trying to keep an eye peeled for the flatbed truck that had been carrying the black drums. But by the time I’d weaved through the narrow canyon and made it to the outskirts of Idaho Springs, I’d concluded that the driver had probably exited, as he had planned all along, at Highway 6 at the bottom of the hill. I was certain, too, that he had already ditched the truck.

  The flatbed was undoubtedly stolen, anyway.

  The Death Angels would disappear.

  Until the next time.

  No one, but me, would know what they’d done.

  The valve clatter resumed as I urged the battered Porsche on the long climb from Georgetown up the insanely steep hill that leads to the twin bores that pierce the Continental Divide. I downshifted and forced the rpm higher to keep the tinny patter under control.

  The rest of the way up to the Eisenhower Tunnel I didn’t see a single soul standing by the side of the road with a cell phone.

  Nor anyone with a high-powered rifle.

  “We kill people. ” That’s what Lizzie had said.

  Earlier, as I’d driven away from the mayhem that had ensued after the tumbling black drums, I hadn’t looked back to see the carnage on the highway behind me. I hadn’t wanted to count the lifeless bodies or the fractured, bleeding ones. I didn’t want to know the final number of mangled vehicles. I admit that I felt some exhilaration that my own corpse wasn’t among the ones being counted, but the relief lasted only as long as a bolus of adrenaline could carry it.

  The exhilaration was replaced by selfishness, and then by guilt.

  Shame wasn’t far behind.

  “We kill people,” Lizzie had said.

  Yes, we do.

  Damn, we do.

  SIXTY

  I turned off Lizzie’s cell phone—the one I’d originally found in her lingerie drawer—while I was up in the mountains with Thea and the kids. If she was still on the roster of the Death Angel varsity, she would know that I’d survived the mass murder that they’d arranged for my benefit on I-70, and she would know that I was up in Ridgway with my family. She would probably even be able to guess why I was there. She would certainly be able to guess why I didn’t want to be talking with her.

  I took her at her word that I was safe in my home.

  More crucial to me, of course, was that I took her at her word that all my girls were secure there, too.

  LaBelle e-mailed me, as promised, with the results of the search I’d asked her to do. The gist? She needed more time to track down the names of physicians who were board-certified in both neurology and oncology.

  “It’s not as straightforward as you thought,” she wrote. “I’ll stay on it until I get it right.”

  FedEx delivered a package for me shortly after eight o’clock the next morning. I knew the FedEx guy almost as well as I knew the mailman; that’s how frequently he came to our house. His arrival caused absolutely no suspicion from Thea.

  Inside the flat FedEx envelope was a single piece of stationery from the St
. Julien Hotel in Boulder, the new hotel that was only a block away from my shrink’s office.

  On it Lizzie had scribbled, “Found him. You were right. He is in New Haven. We don’t have much time.”

  Adam?

  Why, I wondered, don’t we have much time? Her health? My health? The Death Angels’ plans?

  Or is it a trap? Has she found Adam at all?

  I phoned LaBelle. “Any word from Mary?”

  “Good morning to you, too. And yes, dear Mary did call. She stays in touch.” LaBelle put the emphasis firmly on the she . “She phoned to say there’s a problem with the backup generator on the plane. A part’s being shipped to Centennial and she is flying there this afternoon from her current location to have it installed. She doesn’t want to get the plane repaired by anybody other than the people we usually use at Centennial. You may know why, but she’s not telling me.”

  LaBelle waited for me to tell her. She expected me to tell her. I didn’t tell her.

  “O-kay. She thinks the plane will to be ready tonight, late. She said you can count on her meeting you in Telluride, as you asked, but it will have to be in the morning, after sunrise.”

  “Please tell her to rush the repairs if she can, and I’ll count on getting to Centennial tonight. She should be prepared for a red-eye.”

  “You bet,” LaBelle said. I could almost hear her heels clicking together; she’d resorted to her good-soldier voice. LaBelle didn’t like being out of the loop and she wasn’t trying to pretend otherwise.

  “That other thing, LaBelle? The search you were doing for me? Any progress since yesterday?”

  “Progress, yes. Answers, no. Soon, I hope. By lunchtime maybe. End of the day for sure. It’s turned out to be more difficult to get those databases than I expected it would be.”

  “It’s okay to spend money. As soon as you have something, okay?”

  “You got it. You still want the word through e-mail?”

  “Or text, but yes. Just notify me that you have what I want. I’ll call you.”

  “Anything else?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”