by Martin Rose
She looked away. “My husband wasn’t made for prison. He doesn’t have it in him to do the hard things. At least in prison, the violence is more honest. Before all that happened, when push came to shove, he wanted it all to end. He wanted out, and he figured a prison cell would be safer, where Jamie and the Echo Inspector coudn’t get to him.”
She laugheed, bitter. “Of course, if you plan on sleeping, nothing is guaranteed. In the end, he acquiesced with the authorities and our lives were destroyed. And isn’t that what I deserve?”
I thought of my dead brother.
Isn’t that what I deserve?
She let the plaintive question hang in the air the way people do when they want someone else to tell them it’s going to be all right. That what they did wasn’t so bad after all. That everything could go back to the beginning.
This human body with all its human complications had made of my emotions a miasma of conscience and recriminations. She’d killed many in cold blood, under an odd coercion of government influence. I’d killed my brother in the fit of passion. But elementally, the same crime. With the pressure of a larger force at work, making pawns of us.
The old gray fox, a voice sneered inside me. How like Jamie it sounded.
I stared at her as though I could cull the answer from her face. The deep etchings of her wrinkles. The heartbreak in the lines of her mouth, her forehead. She looked sad and crumpled in on herself as a woman might when everything has been taken from her. Did I look any better, like a junkie gone twitchy, heroin thin and with blood spattering the belly of my shirt?
“Are you going to take me in?” she whispered.
I reached into my hoodie and withdrew the Glock. Held it in my hands, the muzzle pointed at the ground. Her breath hitched.
“Or kill me?” she said. “Like you did Jamie?”
“Not like Jamie,” I said, agitated and got up to pace the window. Elvedina, still unconscious—or whatever passed for unconsciousness if you had all the life functions of an Atari mounted on a bicycle frame.
“You’re not in prison,” she hissed. “How did you get out? And you want to send me there?”
This was not a direction in which I had anticipated our conversation going. I thought it would be easier, to apprehend her and turn her over to the government and not ask too many questions. My freedom was contingent on it, like any business contract, and failure to hold up my end of the bargain could end with me back in prison, serving time for Jamie’s murder. But by the minute, with each violation of law and ethics, the terms of the contract itself appeared to be eroding and now she was interrogating me.
I still held the firearm in one hand. This gun had seen me through more extremities than I could name and now it seemed an empty symbol of a dead life I no longer owned.
“They say you killed him in cold blood,” she continued, relentless. She knew it needled me and hit on the tectonic plates in my psyche, setting into motion quakes and shifts beyond my control. “They say you killed him—”
“I don’t care what they say!” I roared and rounded on her. All the life in me fled and left behind the rotted carcass of my primal identity, my broken Id pushing through the surface before I subsided. Calmer. Rational. “I don’t care what they say. They didn’t know Jamie.”
“I knew Jamie,” she snapped.
“Oh did you? Did you know him like you knew Dietrich? Know him like you knew Kylie Stefano? Know him like you knew Anna Maison?”
“But I’m the only one who’s gonna do time for it,” she said and made a fist, slamming it on the coffee table. The glass crackled and spider webbed beneath and she did not notice or care. Blood oozed from the edge of her hand and she didn’t feel it. Her jaw flexed and twitched with agitation. “They say you didn’t remember what happened.”
I glanced at her and looked away.
“You remember,” she whispered.
“Be silent,” I said. “I can’t think with all this noise.”
“You remember but you didn’t want to talk. I might have killed people and that makes me no different than you, but they weren’t my own blood, for God’s sake. Why do you get special treatment? Why should you walk free after killing people, but my husband and I get sent to the cage when we didn’t ask for this, we didn’t ask to be coerced into this? You don’t know what they’ll do to us once we’re inside. They’ll take us away. They’ll vanish us. And you, you can keep on killing people by the dozen like it doesn’t matter—”
“You don’t know anything,” I said and came over the couch, stepping right into the cushion and over the arm rest. She leaped up before my relentless pursuit, but I’d had enough. I itched for another Atroxipine hit. Her endless revolving back to my own crime brought me full circle, past to the present. She wasn’t Polly Highsmith anymore. She was Jamie when I burst through the door—
“Is this what you want to know?” I asked and pushed the muzzle over Polly’s heart. “That this is how I did it? That I remember every detail, that I think about it when I fall asleep and when I wake up?”
Her lower lip trembled but her eyes were forged in steel and cast in iron. She lifted her chin and pressed into the muzzle, daring me to shoot.
“Go ahead,” she said. “Why wait?”
An echo of the past, and I heard it resound in my brother’s voice:
Why wait?
“Every time I dream, I forget that I killed him, and every time I dream, I forget I’m living a nightmare. I’ll wake up and Jamie will be alive. I’ll hate him with the same fever as before.”
“When you do it,” Polly said and closed her eyes, “take care of my husband. That’s all I ask. Take care of him.”
“Take care of her,” Jamie said. “I love you, brother. Beware the echoes and specters.”
“I’m not going to kill you, Polly,” I said, and the gun fell to my side.
She screamed. Thrust her hands into her hair and screamed.
“I’m not going to kill you, Polly,” I said again when silence filled the room. “It concerns me, that you’d rather die, than serve time. Because I gotta wonder, what it is they are doing to people and prisoners that is so horrifying you’d rather be shot by a villain like me than face what’s waiting for you in secret rooms where no one will know where you disappeared to, and no one will know you’re screaming and dying in the deepest dungeon, as fodder for the same experiments you put those rats through. You’ll never see a day in court. Your husband got off easy compared to what they’ll do to you. Is that about right?”
She put her hands over her eyes and would not look at me.
I cursed. I wondered what my father would want me to do. If he was counting on me to do anything at all. I groaned and rubbed my hands over my face and closed my eyes. I squeezed my head in my hands.
Get up and arrest her, my father’s voice commanded.
You know, sometimes, a pawn can just walk off the board, my Id chuckled as though he sat beside me on the couch, plucking the whiskey glass out of my hand and staring down into it with disappointment. There’s another way. And won’t that burn the old man’s ass hairs.
More than that, Polly was right. I killed my brother in cold blood. I should, by rights, be sitting in a jail cell. I deserved no mercy. Polly and Blake had been coerced and corrupted and threatened. They did not deserve this. She did not deserve this.
This new body, with ready-made chemistry and fizzing cells, brought with it a conscience I never had as a pre-deceased corpse. I had been beyond the law because laws were made for living citizens, not the dead. I didn’t have to care because nothing mattered.
Living now, everything mattered. My human condition was literal, and membership to the ranks came with a terrible choice—which would I choose? Acknowledge that I had no right to be her judge when I belonged in a prison cell? Turn her over to the authorities, and do the right thing and turn myself in as well? Or hand her over to Lionel and sleep at night on a nice mattress in a spacious room and never think on Blake and Polly ag
ain?
My duty? Or my conscience?
To be, or not to be.
My fist spasmed around the gun, and I realized that I had the chance to do the thing I hadn’t the courage to do for Jamie: let her go.
“You were never here.”
Polly startled. Her mental state flipped on a switch. Tears drying as she lurched to her feet. Eyes becoming hard and cold and small in her face.
She grabbed her duffel with a grunt. She’d been ready for this and was making good on it. I rose up to my feet with a glance down the long dark hallway where Elvedina still lay, shorted out and useless as an Energizer Bunny that ran down its battery.
Polly turned with her bag in one hand and her other on the door to look at me.
Thank you, she mouthed.
The lines in her face from worry and nights killing persisted; they would always be there. They would never fade. I found solace in the fact that Polly would provide a punishment for her crimes of a different sort; and it was the best I could hope for in this new and uncertain warped world I had entered where courts were perverted and laws rendered meaningless.
I approached and stopped short, waiting for her to open the door.
“One day, if things should change, I may have to find you. Do you understand?”
She nodded, tight.
“Tell Blake I love him,” she whispered, swallowing down a sob, and then jerked open the door.
It had stopped raining. The sky overcast, bled gray in a weepy half-light. The vulture scowled over us from the roof of the porch as Polly made her way down the stairs and I closed the door behind me.
I thought about going with her. I was surrounded by too much intrigue and a leave of absence could reduce the heat and give me time to convalesce. The thought balanced on the tip of my tongue and I had decided to open my mouth and tell her, Wait, I’m coming with you when the putter of old exhaust, a heaving engine like a rough beast slouching in our direction, turned the corner. A panel van, pulling across the driveway, blocking the exit.
I lifted my hand to shade my eyes and saw a man I did not recognize behind the wheel. The kind of meaty, heavy-duty weightlifter who would have beaten the shit out of me at the prison.
Polly dropped her bag outside the car door and stared.
The passenger door opened.
Lionel stepped out.
*
His silver cane sent a slash of light across my face as I rushed down the porch. The vulture stared, erect, his eyes black volcanic glass as I stood beside Polly, my boots sinking into the long grass.
The driver of the van turned the key and the ignition died, spoiled exhaust fume evaporating across the pavement. In the silence, a distant hum subsumed the outlying traffic, the sound of our breathing, until a familiar motorcycle painted in flame careened into view.
Lafferty’s modified motorcycle painted a line of heat down the road surface to the shadow of the van. The machine sputtered to a stop and he leaned with one hand set against the panel van, black glove mapping the numerous dents of bad driving decisions past. His face grim with a bandanna over his mouth, eyes unreadable behind his sunglasses.
“You bastard,” Polly whispered. She quavered in and out of my periphery. If she thought I had betrayed her, I didn’t disavow her of the notion.
Lionel shuffled up the driveway, past the withered pansies sitting in muffin-topped red mulch gone faded with decomposition. Lionel looked as though he were merely a man on holiday as he navigated the driveway, slow, slow. But now I calculated him anew. Wondered how much of his pace was a show for my benefit to make him appear more fragile than he actually was. I pictured how he had concentrated and steadied the trembling of his hands. How much of that was made up? His pocket bulged out with the weight of the grenade, if that story had ever been true. From here, he looked like a harmless man, making any act of aggression on my part unwarranted and criminal. I could only stand there and wait to see what he would do when he finally finished his long and drawn out approach. The hint of a smile on his face, knowing that he drew out the tension with every step as Lafferty coaxed the bike up over the curb and eased it, inch by inch.
Lionel came to a stop, tapped his cane on the ground, and looked at the house with his expression still fixed as that of a kindly old man. Your dear sainted grandfather, out on a country walk.
“Oh, excellent, Vitus. You’ve apprehended the suspect.”
I said nothing.
“Your father will be pleased.”
Polly opened her mouth. “I want an attorney—”
“Shut your mouth,” I hissed, and Polly said no more.
“What happens to her?” I asked him.
Lionel raised one eyebrow.
“I thought we already talked about this, my boy. We have our own way of meting out justice.”
“How about the constitutional way? You got room for that in your playbook?”
He laughed, generous and gusty.
“What’s gotten into you, Vitus? You know we have our own guidelines. She’ll be treated very well.”
“But she won’t see the inside of a court room.”
“Well—”
“Say it,” I cut him off. “Answer me, instead of obfuscating. You capable of a direct answer?”
“Boy, I thought we’d been through enough now that you would trust me. I’ve already given you the answer, why would it matter now?”
Lionel’s last ditch efforts to wheedle into my good graces had all the greasy charm of a desperate carpetbagger waving cash in front of my face. I could not be bought so cheaply, not anymore. No doubt his years among politicians and criminals could not prevent him from trying. For some, duplicity comes embedded in their bones. Lionel would, until the bitter end, lie even when it made no sense to do so, lie because his tongue only moves in one direction and no other, making him the most hideous monster of all.
Polly’s eyes flicked to me. Everything about her, frozen like a deer crossing a super highway, dazzled by the stream of endless lights crashing down upon her.
“Run,” I said.
She looked at her duffel bag, looked at Lionel and Lafferty. The man in the motorcycle balanced atop the thrumming machine, gripping the handles tight.
I grabbed her by the arm and pushed her past Lionel. She stumbled across the driveway.
“Run!” I yelled.
“Look here,” Lionel said, “that’s rather ridiculous, you can’t let her do that—”
Polly ran. Her shoes hit the pavement and her breath picked up. The cul-de-sac amplified the sound like an echo chamber and she glanced backward and I screamed at her to run again. The man driving the van tracked her through the windshield with nothing to say and no reaction. Hired thug or just a hired driver? Lionel’s lips and face imitated a twisted rag, a sudden flash of the real man inside. Angry and deadened. Stony and heartless eyes behind the glitter of his false compassion. The old gray fox was better at this than Lionel; he never would have shown that much of himself, not even in extremity.
“Lafferty!” Lionel barked. “Shoot her.”
Lafferty blinked and did nothing.
“Dammit, you’ll do as I say!” Lionel hissed and reached up to strike Lafferty with the cane. Even I had not seen that coming. Lafferty flinched and his motorcycle took the impact with a faint listing; with the second strike, he snatched at Lionel’s cane and tore it out of his grasp, his face reddening. The old man stumbled, hissing like a snake to stand on his own two feet with energetic aplomb.
He lunged for his weapon, yanking it out of the shoulder holster beneath his suit jacket. An old 1911. The sort my father likes to use, I thought with disgust. He leveled it to take a shot at Polly, who fell to her knees and put her hands over her head without a sound, waiting for the bullet to descend.
I reached out and jerked his arm up into the air. The round discharged. Lionel gave a frustrated cry, showing the row of his yellow teeth like the edge of a paper. He surrendered the weapon to my grasp. Pants of his furiou
s breath and his muttered curses. He reached into his pocket to withdraw the grenade.
“Oh, shit on me,” Lafferty cried and wheeled backward out of Lionel’s path. He jerked the handle bars and hurtled into fresh speed and away from the incendiary device. He carved a path to Polly, who stood, stunned and confused, to commence her run in the aftermath of the gun blast, her mouth open and her eyes wide as she watched Lionel withdraw the iron ball in one hand and pull the pin.
I want to tell you the vulture swooped down from his perch and plucked the grenade out of his hand and carried it away where it exploded into mid air, harming no one.
I want to tell you it was too old to be viable and the dynamite buried deep in the heart of the grenade was null and void and all it did was give an ineffectual puff and become nothing more than harmless dust.
But we don’t deal in happy endings here.
I saw everything in hyper motion. Was my intensity fueled by Atroxipine? I’d remember the elapsing seconds forever. Seeing how his gnarled fingers twined ’round the ring in rows of bone and then yanked and the pin worked free. Committing to memory the yellow paint on top of the grenade, marking it as a wartime munition. Thinking that my very own father had held that grenade in his hand and if he hadn’t saved Lionel’s life all those years ago, we wouldn’t be here with that grenade in Lionel’s hand today.
I had only several seconds with which to decide all of our fates.
Atroxipine sped up everything, Atroxipine sent my mind racing through every possibility. Made me see all the timelines stretching out from me in a thousand directions. Made me imagine and perceive with terrible clarity every detail of Polly’s agony as the grenade landed near her and then blew a hole at her feet, taking her legs with it. The pavement streaming blood into the gutter that would leach out into the mighty and terrible Atlantic Ocean. Blood and sand. I pictured if Lionel missed. I saw myself try to shoot him. I saw myself try to save Polly and fail. I saw myself, ducking and taking cover. Saw Lafferty, his motorcycle upturned and new parts of him missing. The wheels of his bike, spinning in empty space.