Lethal Injection

by Jim Nisbet

  Royce was fascinated. She had demonstrated great dexterity.

  She took another deep breath and sighed.

  “Now you,” she said.

  “Me?” he said.

  She smiled sleepily at him. “Then both of us,” she said dreamily.

  Royce reached uncertainly for the aluminum foil.

  “No,” she said. “I’ll do it all for you. You’d blow it.”

  “Oh,” he said.

  “No offense,” she said, scraping the remainder of the powder onto the foil. “It’s for your own good. Without the right touch it can go all at once and you lose the smoke. Or if it’s too hot you can burn your lungs. It’s too expensive to waste.”

  He watched her make an even line of the powder along the crease in the foil. Then he watched the lines of her breasts against the thin cotton cowgirl shirt as she leaned over the table. Once again her long black hair, tied back in the loosening braid, draped the side of her pockmarked face from her forehead across her cheek to her shoulder, and reminded him of a Pieta, a fond mother leaning over her blessed child. This idea of corrupt motherhood filled him with tenderness and lust, and it was as her willing student that he attentively posited his nose over the aluminum foil and inhaled deeply of the seductive fumes rising from it. The effect was almost immediate. He’d been drinking too much to be fooling around with heroin, not that it was dangerous in its present quantity, but the subtleties of its effects would be wasted on him. Or so he hoped. But a languid power diffused itself throughout his being and made a home there. He felt otherworldly, relaxed, sick and, curiously, as if he were party to a burgeoning integrity.

  “How do you feel?” she asked.

  He was gasping for air, a weightless yet hopeless victim of gravity. His eyes wouldn’t stay open. “I feel bad,” Royce said thickly.

  “That’s good,” she said.

  “I’d like to…to lie down…”

  “Good idea,” she whispered. “Let’s.”

  His eyelids were sinking. He forced them open to look at Colleen. Her green eyes dwindled vertiginously to tiny dots as he watched them.

  “It’s not,” Royce protested as she helped him up, “not what you think…” It was true, it wasn’t what she thought. At least, it wasn’t what he thought she thought. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to sleep with her; he did Very much. It was just that, right now, he just wanted to lie down, just for a few minutes. Maybe right here on the floor. Go nose on nose with a roach. Then they could…He and Colleen… Later. . .

  Then Royce realized that he was about to lose consciousness. Losing consciousness seemed like a good idea. He just wanted to lie down to do it.

  Colleen got him to the bedroom and onto the bed. Daylight had happened already. He could feel the heat of the day beginning to rise from the city, but he was cool, more detached from the weather than he’d been in a long, long time.

  He lay on the bed with his eyes closed while she moved about the room. He hadn’t lost consciousness. Or had he? He felt no urgency to do anything. He just lay there with his eyes closed and soon the thought occurred to him that he was enjoying himself. He was very comfortable. Everything around him had gone to hell, or was going to hell, and that was fine; he was very comfortable, thank-you.

  He began to think about things, languidly. He thought of Pamela screaming at him so loudly, so fiendishly that she became a soundless blur, vibrating on a frequency he couldn’t clearly receive. He thought of Bobby Mencken’s kiss, and in his mind he touched the lips Bobby’s lips had touched. Royce didn’t actually touch them. But in his mind he did. He saw the three people in the bar, glasses raised, looking at him, tacitly refusing to drink with a man who cynically raised his glass to the innocent and the guilty roasting alike in hell. He saw Johanson’s red face, bloated in fury. He saw the faces of the witnesses watching him through the glass observation window of the gas chamber. They watched him without expression, their mouths slightly open, their faces pale against a pale green background. The reflections of the lights on the glass separating them from him wavered slightly, undulated gently along the horizontal. Then a small school of fish floated between Royce and the open-mouthed, pale faces of the death-chamber witnesses. The fish were almost transparent, with cobalt blue fins and bright yellow mouths and diagonal crimson streaks behind their eyes. They took their time swimming, a wiggle of a fin here, a flick of a tail there, and tilted to investigate the glass between themselves and the witnesses without fear. One turned to look at Royce. A bubble wavered upward from a gaping witness’s mouth.

  Only then did Royce realize they were all underwater. He laughed. It was a gentle laugh, because he had no energy for that sort of thing at all, but still it was a laugh. It felt good. Because, he realized, laughter is stronger than nausea. Everybody should feel this good, he thought, should feel more than nauseous. Then, of course, he wanted to cry, because he couldn’t remember the last time he’d laughed. He realized it had been a long time, because he could feel the downward creases in his face resist the upward tendencies of his smile.

  Far off, someone was handling him. He made slits of his eyes, or thought he did. Colleen pulled off one of his shoes for him. Then the other. Actually, he could see just fine, right through his eyelids in the dark.

  “God, laces,” she said. There was something about her, Royce thought, as he watched her leaning over him. He realized she was naked. Her skin was smooth and brown, like a coffee-colored beach with no footsteps. Her round breasts leaned with her, their nipples pointing at her work, like interested third parties. Her hair was loose and fell curling in spite of its length, past her shoulders and down her sides like a black cape.

  She took off his socks. Then she came around the side of the bed opposite the window and unbuttoned Royce’s shirt. He watched her closely. She was indeed a very beautiful woman. Royce had never seen such a beautiful unclothed body. And in spite of his narcosis he yearned for her. As she peeled his shirt off he fitted the palm of his hand to her buttocks and caressed the cleft between them.

  “I have died,” he said, as she backed away to slide the inverted sleeve of the shirt over his hand. He let the arm fall and smiled. “I have died and gone to malpractice heaven.”

  Then she unbuckled his belt and unzipped the zipper on his pants.

  “Mmmm,” she said dreamily, and kissed him. Royce was back in his seventeen-year-old mode.

  “Pinch me,” he said, weakly stroking her hair, “I must be dreaming.” And she did, intimately.

  She peeled the pants down over his legs and feet, one at a time, and dropped them to the floor at the end of the bed. Then she left the room.

  “W here… ?” Royce protested, but he was too stoned to do anything else. He’d been robbed of everything, apparently, but his virility. It was like an image without a context.

  She reappeared bearing the whiskey bottle and set it on the floor next to his side of the bed.

  “My side of the bed,” Royce said quietly, watching her. “I like that.”

  Colleen said nothing. She lifted a leg over him and stepped onto the bed, then knelt and leaned toward the window. She had to stretch to reach the frayed hem of the curtain. The curtain looked like burlap, but Royce wasn’t looking at the curtain. His hand probed her behind as she drew the rough cloth along the rod to cover the window. The room was cast into a shadowy obscurity.

  Then Colleen turned around and showed things to Royce he’d only heard about in the prison hospital, from the convicts who had done them to each other.

  FOURTEEN

  Three days after the bungled robbery, Colleen and Royce were still in bed.

  Late the first day they’d left the apartment only long enough to buy more whiskey and heroin with Royce’s money. He wouldn’t let Colleen take it out in trade and insisted she pay cash for it. But it wouldn’t be long before he’d have to let her do so, because he didn’t have all that much cash.

  So the second day he’d magically produced out of his Gladstone bag
the bottle of pharmaceutical morphine and introduced her to it. She had never taken morphine before, and Royce was proud to be able to show this woman, who had been showing him so much, something new. She in turn introduced him to the practice of injecting the drug directly into a vein in his arm. He in turn converted her to the sanitary practice of disinfecting the site with isopropyl alcohol both before and after the injection, and the novel idea of using a fresh disposable diabetic syringe each time, of which he had a plentiful supply.

  Colleen Valdez was very grateful for the morphine. She even began to allow Royce to inject her. After all, being a doctor, he was very good at it. Moreover, he immediately noticed a certain perverse thrill associated with the act of injecting her, which he could only liken to sexual foreplay. As for the rest of the formalities, the alcohol and the clean syringes and so forth, she merely put up with it to indulge him.

  After all, he was the doctor. Colleen could play the patient Or nursy, with Royce as the patient. There was plenty of time to work out the kinks.

  Thus, for the next twenty-four hours they didn’t leave the apartment at all. Later, she went out for an hour to buy whiskey and potato chips while Royce grabbed a little shut-eye.

  By dusk on the third day Royce had been all over the place, so far as the bed was concerned, and was lying on his back again. Colleen knelt on top of him, her arms hooked under his shoulders, and they were slowly, very slowly, passing the time. Then Eddie Lamark came home.

  He just appeared in the doorway to the bedroom. Royce wasn’t really sure if he’d noticed Eddie before Eddie spoke.

  He saw Eddie no longer had on the flowered shirt but a blue and white checked cowboy number, open to the waist. Sweat streaked his temples and cheeks, and he looked a little worse for wear, gaunt and tired. An unlit cigarette dangled from his mouth, and he stood in the doorway squinting through the gray twilight of the bedroom at the couple on the bed.

  “Well, now,” he drawled, “that’s just about the prettiest thing I’ve seen all week.”

  As though dancing together without speaking, Royce and Colleen, lost in their private reflections, were both slow to react to the interruption. Royce enlarged the slits of his eyes enough to see the checked shirt through the hair falling over his face from the girl’s shoulders and said nothing. Dimly he thought that, if Eddie still had his gun, Franklin Royce might be about to be history. A messenger bearing the scrolls of panic was dispatched from one part of his system to some other part, but was lost along the way, only to arrive shortly in the neighborhood of Royce’s groin, where the information was scrambled into an unprecedented eroticism Fear became drowned in renewed pleasure. To die now was to die in the saddle, in the throes of happiness, and he smiled and arched his back at the possibility.

  Colleen noticed the redoubling of Royce’s effort and reacted with a purring sound in her throat. She didn’t even turn around when she said gently, with a distant note of surprise, “Eddie, you’re back.”

  “No, your back,” Eddie repeated, “is the prettiest sight I seen in three days.” He was fiddling with his belt. “Don’t get, up, Colleen honey,” he added hastily. “Don’t move; don’t change a thing; I’ll be right there.”

  Eddie left his pants where they fell and, unsnapping the bottom two buttons on the checked shirt, knelt on the bed behind Colleen. He wrapped two thick tresses of Colleen’s long black hair around his fists like a stagecoach driver taking the reins for the long haul to El Paso.

  “Giddap,” he said. The unlit Salem was still clenched between his teeth.

  Then the three of them began to do things Royce had only heard about in the prison hospital, from the convicts who did them to each other.

  “The old woman met me on the first floor landing with a Colt .44,” Eddie said later, as the three of them lay in bed smoking cigarettes, “a real antique.” In the past couple of days Royce had taken to having a puff or two as Colleen smoked. “I’d been in the house less than a minute.”

  Eddie took a pull on Royce’s bottle. “She never even asked me my name,” he said. “The lights suddenly came on and there she was, about ten steps up the staircase. She just started blowing holes in the wall behind my head.”

  “The tube said she only fired once,” Royce said.

  Eddie passed the bottle to Royce. “You got to get hip to the notion that there’s a ten percent margin of error, minimum,” Eddie shook a finger at the ceiling, “in all television, newspaper, and radio reportage. That’s minimum, and don’t get me started.”

  “Sure,” said Royce, “O.K.,” thinking, goddamn know-it-all.

  “She got off at least two,” Eddie continued, “and she probably wasn’t a bad shot, either. She was scared, so her aim was shaky. Hell, I was scared too.” He drew on his cigarette and exhaled smoke into the air before them. Outside the open window beyond Eddie, a faraway dog yapped and a car horn distantly sounded one long, two short.

  “But the scareder I get, the straighter I shoot,” Eddie said.

  “Plus you got experience,” Royce added. Colleen pinched him.

  Eddie turned toward Royce in the gloom, looked at him for a moment, looked at Colleen, then looked away. Another moment passed. “Yeah,” Eddie said finally.

  Aha, Royce thought to himself. Colleen and I have a secret, and she wants to keep it that way. Come to think of it, so does Eddie. Her hand rested over his thigh where she’d pinched him. He nonchalantly covered it with his hand and gave it a reassuring squeeze. She drew hers away and pointed behind him.

  “Reach me that ashtray, Royce,” she said.

  He looked at her a moment, then retrieved a peanut can heaped with butts and pull-tabs from the inverted wooden keg that served as a nightstand next to the bed. It was the kind of little barrel, bound in iron hoops, that horseshoes used to come in. Royce studied the keg and held the can while Colleen rubbed out the glowing end of her cigarette. Pamela’s uptown blacksmith made house calls out of a brand new Winnebago fitted out as a smithy. He towed a modest forge complete with electric bellows on a small trailer behind it. There was an anvil on the back bumper. He dealt horseshoes to his customers a few at a time out of a selection of such kegs, and the bills were extravagant, at least twice what a working ranch might expect to be charged. Moreover, the man liked to make broad insinuations about the favors of certain lonely equestriennes. The blacksmith was a big, hairy bastard, his arms littered with scabbed burns from working the forge, and Royce hated him.

  He thoughtfully replaced the ashtray. Why should he ever have to lay eyes on that sonofabitch again?

  He’d been gone from home for four or five days. It was highly unlikely that anyone would ever think of looking for him in this part of Dallas. Pam could have the house—a court would give it to her anyway; hell, her Daddy had put the down payment on it. She could have the ranch, the animals, the blacksmith, the whole stinking life. Most of all, she could have herself.

  He settled back against the pillow behind him. His bare leg lay against Colleen’s. He regarded the taper of her body for a moment and thought, I like it here.

  Eddie belched loudly. Royce’s eyes skipped over Colleen’s smooth thighs to Eddie’s pale hairy ones beyond. He had knobby knees.

  “As Marlon Brando said, ‘She didn’t give me no selection, Dad.’” Eddie sniffled and rubbed the flat of his hand up across his nostrils. “After the gunplay there was at least twenty minutes before you all were supposed to come back, and she and I must have sounded like Beirut at midnight, banging away at each other in there. There was nothing to do but flee. I took a chance and looked in the garage. The keys were in the switch and an electric garage door opener was clipped to the sunshade. Nice car, too, a new Buick. It was so well laid out I thought it was a trap.” He snapped a fist at the air in front of him, as if catching a fly. “It wasn’t, though.”

  Nobody said anything. Royce fingered the two festering disks Eddie had burned into his neck. Each was about a quarter-inch across with a thick crust on it.


  “But what about the shirt, Eddie,” Colleen asked curiously. “Said on the tube the police arrested a man wearing a flowered shirt like somebody saw driving that Buick away from the Greyson house.”

  Royce leaned forward and grinned knowingly. “That part of that ten percent margin of error?”

  Eddie nodded sagely. “Depends on how you look at it, Royce,” he said, clasping both his hands behind his head and leaning back against the wall, with the filter of a Salem clenched between his teeth. “I tore out of there backwards, all the way down to the street. Then I headed back the way you all were supposed to come from, thinking that with some luck I’d intercept you on the way back, or waiting on a corner some place. Then I could have switched cars almost immediately and they’d never have found us.”

  “Smart,” Royce said uneasily. But he was thinking, what does he mean they’d never have found us. Have they found us?

  Colleen lit another cigarette and blew a smoke ring between them.

  Eddie shook his head. “Just a dumb idea I had, like watching your number on the wheel of fortune. Trouble with hopes like that is, you’re still staring at your number after the wheel has stopped and they’ve taken your money away. Then they take you away. Can I get a witness?”

  “Hallelujah,” Royce said uncertainly.

  “Tell it,” Colleen said.

  “You got to play the combinations.” Eddie spoke with conviction.

  “That’s if you’re taking chances,” Royce said.

  “Right on,” Eddie said dryly. “We’re only talking about people who take chances in the first place.”

  Colleen laughed.