Lethal Injection

by Jim Nisbet

  “That’s an honest answer.”

  “Let it be, then.” He opened the closet door and put his bag in it.

  “Said on the television a man died tonight in Huntsville,” Pamela said.

  Royce closed the closet door and headed for the kitchen.

  “Death by injection,” she said, as he moved past her. The kitchen was lit by a single low-watt bulb built into the vent over the stove. He found a glass and put some ice in it from the refrigerator.

  “Nasty kind of a fellow,” Pamela said. “Killed a woman he didn’t know for hardly any reason at all.”

  Makes a saint out of me. He stood looking over the sink at the backyard. “Pamela—”

  “Not unless you consider nine dollars a reason to kill somebody.”

  Here we go. Royce covered the ice with water from the tap and added a couple of inches of whiskey to it. He tapped the top cube down into the mixture and took a sip. Pretty good, but it would be better if it had a chance to cool. Unlikely. He took another sip.

  “Some folks kill for a lot more than that, don’t they, darling,” he said, still watching the darkness out back. Somewhere out there dozed an expensive and nonetheless for it much-neglected quarter horse, broken to an English saddle.

  “And just exactly what’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing, nothing,” he said quietly. “I just—”

  “If some folks knew how to make a decent living, doing decent work, charging decent wages for it, they wouldn’t have to go galavanting all over the countryside killing people to make ends meet. Would they?”

  “Not only that—”

  “Not only that,” she raised her voice, “it’s common knowledge that killing a man takes just a minute.” She snapped her fingers. “Less than a minute. Then the killer can be on his way, if he’s got any sense.”

  “Not only that,” Royce frowned, trying to retain his original line of thought, so he could share it with his wife, “not only that, he wouldn’t have to go around killing innocent people.…” His voice trailed off. This was going to be difficult to explain, even to someone who wanted to hear it.

  Pamela was silent a moment.

  Then she said, “That’s the most lame, dim-witted, left-field, college-boy excuse I have ever heard out of the mouth of a grown man in all my life.”

  Royce frowned and turned around. “Beg pardon?”

  “I said,” she put her hands on her hips, “that’s the dumbest, lamest, most off-the-wall excuse I have ever heard!”

  Royce frowned. “Excuse?” He spread his arms. “What excuse?”

  “That excuse!” she shouted. “You come in here at four-thirty in the morning off a case that was over and done with at midnight sharp in Huntsville, two hours’ drive from here, half drunk, and try to throw me off the track with some chicken shit about a tattooed nigger gunslinger being innocent? Or were you suggesting you were innocent yourself? Innocent? I’ll show you who’s innocent, Franklin Royce. I’m putting out a detective on you!”

  Royce couldn’t believe his ears. But one look at Pamela and he knew she wasn’t lying. She was livid with rage.

  “Look, Pamela,” he began.

  “I’m looking!” she screamed. “You think I’m blind?” She clutched her hands to her breast. “I’ve been lying here all night—all night!—waiting for you. And this isn’t the first time, Royce. No! This hasn’t been the first.”

  “Pam, Pam,” he said gently, “you’re completely hysterical.…”

  “I’m not hysterical!” she shouted. “You’re an asshole!” She began to cry. “Night after night,” she sobbed, “waiting, never knowing where you are, who you’re with, why you don’t … why you don’t …”

  He’d heard all this before, but there was always the chance she would come up with a new wrinkle. “Why I don’t … ?” he coaxed her. “Tell me, darling. Why I don’t … ?”

  “L-1-love me.…” she sobbed, breaking down.

  Not a chance. “There, there,” he said, taking a drink.

  “Don’t touch me, Royce,” she said, though he’d made no move to. “I’m not taking this any longer.”

  Royce swirled the sip of cold whiskey around his teeth.

  “I called Daddy …,” she said plaintively.

  Royce closed his eyes, swallowed the whiskey and stared at the baseboard next to the door. He was very tired. “We get any mail?” he asked idly.

  “I told him I was tired, Royce. Tired and lonely and—and scared for our marriage.”

  Royce sighed. “Naturally he was sympathetic.”

  “No,” she said, looking at him, “no.” She shook her head and looked at the floor. “He was shocked, and, and hurt, and surprised, Royce. You know Daddy. He put you through medical school, got us our first place.… He trusts you.”

  “Yeah,” Royce said absently. “He’s a good man. But Pamela,” he added patiently, “that was twenty-five years ago. We haven’t taken a cent off him since. I paid him back for all that twenty years ago. He’s been retired for ten years. We’ve been married for twenty-six years.…”

  “But now,” she said, “he’s not sure about you, Royce.…” Her voice trailed off. “He’s just not sure.…”

  Royce stared at his wife. He had known her almost all of his life and she was still, in her most tragic moments, very attractive. There was something about tragedy and pain that enlivened her features. Self-concern caused her personality to completely realize her features, to fill them out, and vice versa. Any other subject allowed them to collapse—almost implode—inward upon themselves, to inhabit a gibbering universe full of no-seeums and wing shadows. The death of a star, he mused idly. Somewhere along the line she’d become obsessed with aging. They’d waited a long time to have children; they’d planned very carefully for two of them. But when the time came to begin a family, when they’d bought a very good house and were comfortable in spite of her expenditures, she had balked and stalled. Then she made new promises and set new goals. Then she flatly refused to think about children. Finally, Royce had realized that, all along, she’d been terrified of the idea of children from the beginning, and that somehow she had twisted this terror into some kind of pervasive charm in their lives. And, most curious of all, it worked. On the surface, for years, everything seemed fine. Their daily lives achieved a fine veneer, like a smooth plaster cast. It seemed uniformly solid enough, until you looked beneath its surface, where it became a rigid complex of twisted bandages, swathing something increasingly unpleasant, unrecognizable.

  It hadn’t even occurred to Royce to force her to have children, but her terror increased unreasonably until one day she came home with her tubes tied. Just like that. Royce went into shock for six months. Then, the children long forgotten, safely avoided, she had become afraid of everything else. She was afraid to drive a car more than a year old. She was afraid to eat meat; she was afraid not to eat meat. She was afraid to eat cheese. She was afraid of Royce. She couldn’t stand to be in the same house with him; she was afraid to be alone.

  One day he realized he no longer knew this woman who was his wife, and moreover, he no longer cared to know her, whoever she was. Yet, they were married.

  “He says …” She clutched her face.

  Royce had long since become inured to Pamela’s theatrics, but they made it difficult to have a serious conversation with her. There’d been a time, however, when he was amused by them.

  “He says?”

  She lowered her hand and looked directly at him. “He says he’s going to put a detective onto you.”

  Royce stared at her. Pamela’s father was well into his eighties. At one time the two men had been good friends; old man Cotrell had been like a father to Royce. But that had been twenty years ago.

  “Pamela,” Royce said evenly, “is this on the level?”

  “I tried to stop him,” she said quickly, “but what could I do?” She wrung her hands. “You know I can’t tell Daddy anything. He just insisted. I tried to reason with h
im. I told him we—you and I—we could work things out. I said we could go away somewhere, just the two of us, maybe down to, to Cabo, or Puerto Vallarta. Oh, Frank … ,” and she took his head and tried to lay it on her bosom.

  “Can it,” Royce said, twisting out of her grasp. He turned to the sink and topped off his glass with more whiskey, skipping the water.

  “But he wouldn’t be persuaded,” she hissed. “No, on the contrary, he insisted. ‘I know this is going to be hard on you Pamela,’ he said to me, ‘and you know I don’t like butting in on your affairs. But if that doctor of yours is cheating on you, we’d best find out about it. And when we do, why, then,’” she hesitated, “‘then …’”

  “Yeah,” Royce said, draining half his glass so quickly that its rim tapped sharply against his front teeth. “Then you’ll give me a divorce, right?” He lowered the glass and turned to look at her.

  A curious light came into Pamela’s eyes, but it wasn’t as strange as the expression that crawled over the rest of her face.

  “Then,” she said, “then we’ll know who she is, this adultress, who keeps you out drinking and God knows what all, eroding your character, until four-thirty in the morning.” She threw the time at him as if it were a damning accusation. “Spending all your money, leeching all your energy, ruining your career, destroying our marriage …”

  Suddenly Royce was drunk, very drunk, and very tired. His wife’s face was distorted. Her speech was loud and confused. He couldn’t grasp the meaning of the words she was using. It was almost as if he couldn’t hear her. He could hear her, of course; she was practically screaming. Years ago, he might have spent an hour reassuring her, calming her down until she would take a sedative, and then talking to her soothingly until she fell asleep, and he would put her to bed. But that effort had gradually faded. The years had worn him down. And besides, what difference did it make? He’d lately begun to admit to himself that she was pretty far gone. They’d long since ceased to live together as husband and wife. What had originally been intended as a child’s bedroom had long since become his own bedroom. He hadn’t minded, really; it was adjacent to the library. So long as he was in the house she didn’t bother him much, and they rarely crossed paths at night. Once in a blue moon …

  It was the blue moons that nearly killed him. No rhyme, no reason, not even the full of the moon, but off she would go; for days at a time life was hell for them both, and he was afraid to leave her alone in the house. Often, the fact that he had left her alone in the house would set her off, but that never completely explained it. Nonetheless, the fact that he didn’t like to leave her alone had played the devil with his medical practice. It wasn’t all her fault, of course. His drinking didn’t help things either. He’d done quite well, once. Now …

  That’s why he’d quietly taken the corrections job. A few days a week at the prison, tending stab wounds and rape victims. Then this execution business.

  Naturally, she’d found out. She knew everything, such as there was to know. Everything but the truth.

  He’d never cheated on her. Not once.

  Sure, he’d been tempted. But he hadn’t. Somehow, in spite of everything, though it had been years since they’d slept together, he hadn’t taken up with any other women.

  What a fool he’d been.

  He looked at her, Pamela, his lovely wife. Her hideous jaws chewed the air, braying at him; his wife was braying.

  For the second time that night he felt the unfamiliar sensation of tears rising in his eyes. He’d loved her once. Perhaps he still did. He’d never cheated on her, never, never, never.

  He wondered if she knew that. And suddenly, looking at her in the bleary half-light of the kitchen, he realized that she probably knew damn well how it was. All this stuff about detectives and adultery and her eighty-seven-year-old senile daddy . . . But that didn’t stop her.

  Nothing was going to stop her.

  Least of all her beloved husband.

  Her beloved husband, least of all …

  Royce stumbled out of the kitchen into the hallway and opened the closet door. He fell against it, and it in turn slammed against the front door as he leaned to pick up the Gladstone bag. When he had the bag and his balance he turned and made for his bedroom. He heard the crash of dishes and glasses in the kitchen. She had long since destroyed their wedding china; they only bought cheap sets of glasses and dishes now, every couple of months. Besides, that was all they could afford. Business was bad; Royce’s heart wasn’t in it; he spent too much time drinking or at home to build up a good practice. That’s why he’d taken the corrections contract. Pick up a few extra bucks.

  Then they’d offered him four hundred dollars to be present while they executed Prisoner 61-204.

  When he got to his bedroom he locked himself in with the bag. If the bag was safe with him, she could do herself no harm by it. He’d learned that the hard way, a long time ago. He’d forced her to vomit the pills out of her stomach himself, right there in the front hall, next to the closet where he’d kept the bag as long as they’d owned the house. The stain was still on the carpet. Ever since, in his worst moments, every six months or so, a little voice would remind him of that desperate resuscitation, taunting him, asking him why he’d bothered.…

  And yes, he was afraid of her. That’s why he locked the bedroom door every night, in his own house.

  A few drinks and he could get some sleep. A good lock and he could be sure he’d wake up.

  He’d learned that the hard way, too.

  SIX

  Royce wasn’t sure what woke him up so early the next morning, but was surprised that anything short of a rattlesnake with its tongue in his ear could do it. The hangover was bad, but it was a little better than the day’s prospects, like most days. This information had long since become subliminal, and usually allowed him to drink long and hard, sleep long and hard, booze and snooze. It wasn’t until standing at the kitchen sink and draining his second tall glass of tap water that he realized what must have happened.

  He could see the driveway and the front end of his pickup from where he stood, off to the side of the house. Red plastic lay on the cement below the bumper, where he’d crushed her taillight lenses earlier this morning. Her car was gone. But shards of white glass mingled with the red ones on the pavement, and, without leaning over too much, he could see she’d done a little work on his truck on the way out. It would be just like her to notice the broken taillights right off, the paranoid bitch. Tit for tat, a headlight for a taillight lens …

  An eye for an eye. Punitive reciprocity.

  He had a very bad headache. Sound and light fired through his brain the way deep, mile-long cracks shoot through pack ice.

  She had destroyed the kitchen, or rather, most of the stuff in it. Pieces of glass and crockery were everywhere; he had to put his shoes on to get safely to the sink. She’d even torn an upper cabinet door half off its hinges, and one piece of Formica showed the traces of being clawed by desperate fingernails, or a fork. Looking at the room, he could practically hear the Wagner in her mind. If the cops had walked in at that moment, they’d have had him under a hot light in no time, trying to sweat out the location of Pamela’s body.

  Indeed, he wished he did know where she was buried.

  But that kind of thinking had never gotten him anywhere and never would. Or, more precisely, he’d never followed up on it. And never would.

  Right?

  He drew a third glass of water and took it with him to his desk in the library. There he chased down some aspirin. The answering machine tape was blank, as it almost always was. Business was bad; social contacts were nonexistent. The conversation he’d had in the bar on the way home last night was the longest he’d talked to anyone in a long time without shouting at them. Had that been just last night? This morning?

  He looked at the clock. A quarter to twelve. This morning, just barely. It had been a very long one.

  He looked around the so-called library. It was all Pam
ela’s stuff now, mostly, and the remnants among his own books, he hadn’t been able to sell. Some library. To Royce, it looked like some kind of low-tide mark, and little else, a place of small comfort, soon to be mercifully flooded. Unread medical journals, stacks of Architectural Digest, Better Homes and Gardens, Horse and Rider and National Geographic; James Michener, Louis L’Amour, Zane Grey, Barbara Cartland and Danielle Steele novels; overpriced videotapes: Giant, Gone with the Wind, The Last Picture Show, High Noon, Terms of Endearment, Love Story, lots of Astaire and Rogers.

  He stared at the telephone for a few minutes.

  Maybe there was still time to do something about this morning.

  He dialed the prison at Huntsville and got Johanson’s secretary on the line. This was an old trusty that nobody except Johanson trusted.

  “Thurman.”

  “Doctor Royce?”

  “Got that computer in front of you?”

  “You mean my window onto the world, Dr. Royce?” Thurman used the prison’s office computer to effectively maintain his self-image as a globe-trotting socialite in a Noel Coward farce entitled Maximum Security. Also for blackmail and self-aggrandizement.

  “The very same, Thurman,” Royce sighed, pinching his hangover by its sinuses. “Right here, Dr. Royce.”

  “What country are you in, and who’s paying the phone bill?”

  “Oh, Dr. Royce, you know this modem is so expensive to use I had to requisition a private line just to get me as far as the corrections network right downstairs. Yes, they’re so generous down there, and terribly busy. All that dreadfully urgent reform work, you know.”

  “Yes, I—”

  “But since you ask, I’m currently heavily on-line with a delicious little software pirate from Tangier. Dr. Royce, do you know I believe the little piece of goods is lying to me about his age? He says he’s just thirteen, and bought himself his own little old hard disc machine with his very own money—they call dollars dirhams there—which he scrupulously saved from turning tricks in the Medina. And ever since then he’s been off the street and on his keyboard, stealing and dealing software all over the world. All that and only thirteen. Isn’t that just about the finest Horatio Algiers tale-of-success story you ever heard?”