by Jim Nisbet
“So by then I’m cutting along Walnut Hill, and a police car comes hauling the other way with all its lights going. I realize I’m going way too fast and slow it down a bit. There’s this Seven-Eleven out there.”
Colleen nodded.
“I pull through and take a look around. There’s a kid coming out of the store with a six-pack and he heads over to the corner of the parking lot. There’s an old-model red MG parked there with the top down, clean as a whistle. By the time he’s got the bag in the passenger seat, I’m over there asking him for directions to Balch Springs, which you dig is to hell and gone clear across town.
“He starts to point and shakes his head. Them directions is not going to be easy. So he comes over between the cars to give me the details. I’m wiping my prints off the steering wheel with my shirttail. He even squats down. I touch the tip of his nose with the muzzle of the .25. He can smell all nine bullets I just fired out of it. ‘Get in,’ I say, and slip the door latch and slide a little ways over the seat.”
Royce frowned. “Nine?”
“A couple of them missed her,” Eddie said defensively.
“So it was empty?”
“Emptier’n the average middle-class life,” Eddie said. “But the kid don’t know that, of course. Anyhow, the smell of powder makes him weak. I know it does that to me.”
“Gives me a headache,” Colleen volunteered.
Eddie shifted his eyes to her, snorted derisively, then went on with his story, staring straight ahead as if there were a hologram of the events in the gloom beyond the foot of the bed.
“The kid is about nineteen and scared shitless; he gets in. ‘Close the door.’ He closes the door. I get his money and his car keys. ‘Nice shirt.’ He’s doesn’t know what’s up. ‘Trade shirts.’ He looks at me like I’m crazy. ‘Yes,’ I nod at him over the gun, ‘I’m crazy, but I don’t want to hurt you. The shirt.’ We trade shirts.
“It takes just a minute. Another police car goes by toward University Park, all its lights and the siren on. ‘Nice shirt, nice car.’ I held up his wad of bills. ‘How much is here?’ ‘I don’t know,’ he says, ‘maybe two hundred.’ ‘What’s a kid like you doing with two hundred dollars in his pocket, huh?’ He’s staring straight over the wheel and shrugs. ‘Huh?’ ‘I don’t kn-know!’ he yells, stuttering like.
“‘O.K.,’ I say, ‘You don’t know, you can afford to lose it. Here’s the deal. You restore that MG yourself?’ ‘Yes.’ Perfect. ‘Want to see it again?’ He looks at me. ‘Look, mister, you got a nice Buick here, how come—’ ‘Shut up.’ ‘Please—’ ‘Don’t beg, boy, it ain’t manly. I got a deal here for you. I keep the red car and the two hundred.’ He grits his teeth. ‘You, I say, ‘keep your life.’”
Eddie chuckled. “We’re talking in the car like a couple of guys waiting for our girlfriends to quit looking at magazines in the Seven-Eleven. ‘But you got to do me a favor.’ ‘What kind of favor.’ ‘Nothing much,’ I say, ‘a little driving.’ ‘Driving?’ ‘Driving…’”
Royce stifled a yawn. It had been a couple of hours since he and Colleen had taken a shot, and the morphine was wearing off. He scratched himself listlessly. Since yesterday, every time he came down he’d noticed a small hunger, a quiet, persistent yearning, and until he had another shot he was irritable. He recognized it as a hunger for the drug, but so long as they had the drug he was willing to indulge it. It was true that the hunger for the drug was worse than the hunger for food. He was a little disconcerted by this. Moreover, the craving for food could always be traced to the stomach and thus easily defined. The source of hunger for the drug was less traceable, it seemed to come from some place much deeper, more profound than the stomach, and at the same time the hunger seemed to be more generally dispersed throughout his entire system. He smiled. Maybe it came from his soul. More likely, and more terribly, it came from his metabolism. No hedonist can find the strength to deny his own metabolism; his soul, yes, but not his metabolism.
He noticed Colleen idly passing the flat of her hand back and forth along her forearm. She was probably much more strung out than Royce was. From injecting her he’d discovered many scarred veins in both her arms. One particularly bad one felt like a length of twig embedded beneath her skin. An equal dose of morphine had a much milder effect on her than it did on himself. She generally required a quarter to a third increase over his dose.
Now there was a new problem. As soon as Eddie stopped blabbing and paid attention to what was going on around him, he would be cutting into their supply. Courtesy would demand it, wouldn’t it? Would Colleen resent that as much as Royce would? Could she be as disgusted by Eddie as Royce was, too? Did these people react to anything? He reached out and took her cigarette from her. She watched him take a puff, and for a moment their eyes met. The contact was soundless, but Royce could feel her green gaze penetrate to the very roots of his sexuality. A third kind of hunger. He’d never felt like this about a woman before. Lustful. Possessive. Protective. Jealous, maybe? He proffered her cigarette. Her fingers briefly entwined with his. His sex stirred. He exhaled smoke thoughtfully at it. She took the cigarette.
“Eddie,” she said. “What happened to the kid?”
Eddie stopped talking.
Royce sat very still. The room became very silent. Through the open window the neighborhood had momentarily fallen silent; they could hear a jet taking off from Love Field, six or eight miles away.
FIFTEEN
Eddie laughed. “What the hell you mean, baby? Give me a cigarette.”
“Royce has them.”
Royce found the package of Salems on the keg and offered it. Eddie took one. He put the filter to his lips and lit the end with the butt of the previous one, inhaled deeply, exhaled. He moved the window curtain aside with his foot and flicked the butt out the open window. The curtain fell back into place. “Nice to be home fucking and fighting again, baby. It was touch and go there for a couple days.” He inhaled and exhaled smoke again.
“Man, Eddie,” Colleen said, “I don’t know how you do it.”
Eddie smoked some more. Then he asked, “What’s got you two so straight anyway?”
Don’t tell the mother, Royce thought.
Colleen ran her hand up and down the inside of Royce’s thigh. “Royce here happens to have a stash, Eddie,” she said brightly. “We saved some for you, too.” She looked at Royce. Royce looked at her. Damn. But the green eyes and their black lashes in the pitted face, framed by the oval of obsidian hair, might have run an empire, on another planet. A planet of Royces. “Didn’t you, Royce?” She patted his knee encouragingly.
“Yeah,” he said sullenly.
“Royce knows how to make himself welcome.”
“That I do, Eddie,” Royce said, uncertain as to what occasion he was rising. He cleared his throat. “Ever tasted morphine?”
“No, really?” Eddie said, his eyes lighting up like a child’s. “You have M? Genuine M?”
“The best, right out of the hospital,” Colleen said proudly. “This guy Royce is a gift, Eddie. A gift, straight from Bobby Mink.”
Eddie turned and looked at her, then at Royce. For a moment he chewed his lip uncertainly, “Good old Bobby Mink,” he said softly.
Royce’s eyes hardened. “Yeah,” he said, “good old Bobby Mink.” The nerve of this guy Lamark, he thought. There’s not a principle in him.
“It’s a little old,” Colleen said apologetically, patting Royce’s knee some more. “It was in Royce’s doctor bag the whole time he was in stir. His wife never even thought to look in there.”
Eddie smiled uncomfortably. “Probably out selling her ass for it the whole time,” he said vaguely.
“How ironic,” Colleen agreed.
Royce stood up out of the bed. An odor of sweat and stale tobacco rose with him. He self-consciously stood up straight, so his gut wouldn’t look so fat to Colleen. Or to Eddie. “Hard to believe some people can do without the stuff,” he said primly, and turned to the other two,
still lying together on the bed. “Three hits of M, with legs?” he said cheerfully.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Eddie said. “I never would’ve of thought you had it in you.”
“Wait till you get an armful of this stuff, Eddie,” Colleen said. “It’s more fun than a new pony.”
Royce smiled good-naturedly. “In you’s where it’s going, Eddie,” he said. “I’m just grateful you didn’t snake-bite me when you found me in bed with your best girl.”
Eddie shrugged. “What’s wrong with that?” he said. “I get my kicks.”
“Kootchie-kootchie,” Colleen giggled.
“Really?” Royce asked, disgusted.
Eddie held his cigarette hand up, palm outward toward Royce. “Ten or twelve milligrams ought to just about handle it,” he said.
“Is that all?” Royce said as he turned and left the room.
“Yowsah,” Eddie said happily. “The groceries are on me.”
“I’ll take you up on that,” Royce said from the other room.
“Eddie,” he heard Colleen say, “tell me truly, you lying bastard. How’d you manage it?”
“Aw,” Eddie said, “I just let somebody steal the car, that’s all. Easiest thing in the world.”
“You let somebody steal the car?” she said incredulously. “How in the world… ?”
“Then I checked into a motel for a couple of days, just till I could be sure the coast was clear.” He paused.
Watching us the whole time, Royce thought as he stood in the living room, to see if the cops were onto us.
“I knew you didn’t let some kid get a load of you with your shirt off,” she said. “These tattoos would have killed one or the other of you.”
“Sure,” Eddie said. “Hey, does this tickle?”
She giggled. “So where’d you get the money for a motel?”
“Ah, forget it,” he said gruffly. “That whiskey still around?”
Royce listened to this conversation as he pulled the Gladstone bag from behind the couch. She’s real chatty with him, he thought sourly, more than she is with me. The dim living room was illuminated only by the light of the television, its sound turned all the way down. His eyes fell on the short-brimmed sweat-stained beige Stetson he’d left there days ago. It was as if he’d never seen it before. He swept it along with several empty potato-chip bags onto the floor and set the bag on the table. He sat on the couch and busied himself with the paraphernalia.
He could hear the edginess in Eddie’s voice, but he couldn’t be sure if Eddie was nervous about the possibility of a fix after going four days without, or about the vagueness of his own story. But Royce soon tuned out the voices in the bedroom, only half listening to their chatter. He had other things on his mind. He’d decided it was time for Eddie to go.
Colleen had spilled the story. Even though Bobby had been mixed up with the store robbery, had in fact been up to his neck in it, Eddie had allowed him to go down for the murder Eddie himself had committed. Eddie had in fact set Bobby up for the fall. He’d set up his best friend, and incidentally Colleen’s lover, by counting on the fact that Bobby would try to help them out of a jam. Well, he’d helped them all right. And in the process he’d helped himself all the way to Death Row.
Moreover, it wouldn’t be long before Eddie took a second look at Royce.
He took a box of diabetic syringes out of his bag and noisily tore three of them out of their paper packages. These were narrow syringes with very short, small needles on them, twenty-six gauge. Intended for use by diabetics, to inject insulin with a minimum of discomfort, they were ideal for injecting certain other products, too. Morphine, for example. Royce placed the serum bottle of morphine on the table in front of him. Also suitable, he thought, for injecting an overdose of morphine, or—he removed another bottle from the Gladstone bag and placed it on the table beside the first—for injecting a judicious cocktail of Pavulon, potassium chloride and sodium thiopental.
No sense wasting all that morphine.
He took a bottle of alcohol, a couple of balls of cotton and a length of surgical tubing out of the bag.
Then he sat there for a moment and fingered the bullet hole in the Gladstone bag. The bullet hole of integrity. The Hippocratic ricochet. Many thoughts passed through his mind. Among them, that Royce had never killed anyone, even by mistake.
Eddie Lamark, on the other hand, had been directly responsible for killing at least two people that Royce knew of, both of them women, both of them more or less defenseless. Royce found it hard to believe that a seventy-year-old grandmother could be any match for a man as ruthless as Eddie Lamark, even with a Colt .44. Moreover, Eddie had been indirectly responsible for Bobby Mencken’s death. Indirectly, Royce thought, by the slimmest margin of the definition of the word. Eddie had tricked and betrayed Bobby into the death chamber, knowing that Bobby would never return the favor, even if he could.
That made three people Eddie had killed.
Royce was in a position to return the favor in kind.
Moreover, Royce wanted Colleen Valdez—all of her, all to himself. The very thought of watching her again in Eddie’s embrace… Not to mention the threat Eddie no doubt would sooner than later pose to Royce’s own welfare….
He fingered the two small burns on his neck. On the television in front of him the starship Enterprise slid out of orbit. The Revenge of the Branded…
It was time for Eddie to go.
Taking up one of the hypodermics, Royce removed the protective plastic sleeve from the needle, penetrated the rubber cap of the death serum, and depressed the plunger. He inverted the bottle over the syringe and watched it slowly fill by the light of the television beyond. He removed the needle with its telltale squeak.
From the bedroom came the sound of liquid sliding from one end of a bottle to the other and back. “Hey,” Eddie said, “you getting off by yourself in there?”
“Sorry,” Royce said, silently placing the serum bottle on the table top and taking up the bottle of morphine. “Star Trek’s on.”
He heard Colleen’s titter.
“Too much, man,” Eddie said.
“Right there,” Royce said, drawing morphine into the second syringe. How was he going to tell the hypodermics apart? Both solutions showed clear in the syringes.
“Who’s first?” Royce said. He placed the morphine-filled syringe on the left side of the table and removed the cap from the third, empty one. There was a knot in his stomach. Can’t do it with the fluid levels; that’s too obvious.
“I’m O.K.,” Colleen said lazily. “Let Eddie get off first. He’s been out working. I wanna see his face when it hits him.”
“Solid,” Eddie said doubtfully.
“Let Royce hit you, Eddie,” Colleen said. Royce held the bottle inverted before the television and watched the fluid level in the syringe. His hands were damp and shaking.
“What am I, helpless?” Eddie barked.
“That’s O.K.,” Royce lied. “He doesn’t have to do that.”
“No, you’re really good at it,” Colleen said loudly. Then she was saying, “Let him,” in a softer voice. “He really is a doctor.”
Royce could almost see Eddie curl his lip and shrug a shoulder. “Sure,” he said, “let’s see if he can hit me clean the first time.”
“Hey,” Colleen said in the louder voice, “a challenge. Guy in here with his veins petrified like plastic water pipes.”
“I’ll bring the hollow drill.” The needle, Royce thought, taking up the deadliest syringe, bend the needle. Take them all in there, in case he’s wise. He laid the tip of the needle almost flat against the red rubber cap of the morphine bottle and pressed. Sweat rolled into his left eye and stung it. He knew the needle was decently strong, but it was also brittle and might easily snap. He relaxed the pressure and looked. The needle was straight. He applied it again to the cap and pressed harder. He felt it yield. He snatched it away from the bottle and rotated the syringe in the light of the television. T
he needle had a slight crook to it, right where it joined the sleeve affixed to the syringe.
“They’re landing on Altair,” Royce said, without looking at the television. He placed the syringe alongside the other two. “Just as we’re leaving.” Though he knew the poisoned syringe was on the right, he couldn’t tell them apart. He rolled the three of them back and forth. The needle on the poisoned one wobbled and stood out clearly.
Just in case, he thought to himself, and he snatched up the three syringes in his left hand, the hot one uppermost.
In his other hand he gathered the brown bottle of alcohol and cotton swabs, the amber length of rubber tubing. He took a deep breath and entered the bedroom door.
Colleen and Eddie were kissing. Each of them held a lit cigarette with the other’s shoulder in one hand, and the other’s hip in the other hand.
Royce’s jaw tightened. This was going to be easier than he’d thought. He might even take some pleasure in it. But maybe not. Justice can be a sobering thing. “Nice bilateral symmetry,” he said grimly, crossing to Eddie’s side of the bed. “You want to get off this way or that way?”
Eddie immediately broke the clinch with Colleen. “Oh,” he said, “so many choices.” He took a last drag on his cigarette and handed it to her.
“Just make yourself comfortable, Eddie,” Colleen said. “Pretend Royce is a pharmaceutical geisha.” Royce bowed from the waist. He laid the three syringes on the windowsill and screwed the cap off the bottle of alcohol.
Colleen caught Royce’s eye. “This morphine kick is great, Eddie,” she said enthusiastically. “No cooking or running out of matches, no blackened spoons, no looking for little bits of cotton, no clogged points—not even dull ones. And best of all,” she snapped her fingers, “no copping: home delivery.”
“Yeah,” Eddie said. He was massaging the inside of his right elbow and working the arm up and down, paying her little attention.
“Here,” Royce said, “I’ll handle that.”
Eddie looked at him strangely. Then he looked at Colleen. “Don’t I get a sucker, Doc?” Eddie looked at Royce again.