Lawrence Block: A Ticket To The Boneyard

I unloaded all six chambers. I got out my handkerchief and wiped off the bullets and the gun itself, cleaning every surface that might have held a print. Then I made sure he wasn't playing possum before removing the cuffs from his wrists. I took hold of his fingers and touched them to the bullets, then loaded them back into the gun.

I put the gun down and took hold of him under the arms. I dragged him a few yards, then hauled him onto his feet and dropped him in the needlepoint chair. He started to slide back onto the floor but I pulled him up into a seated position and balanced him there. I went back for the Smith, wiped it again with the handkerchief, and fitted it into his right hand. I slipped his finger inside the trigger guard. With my own left hand I worked his jaw to get his mouth open, and then I got the short barrel of the little revolver between his teeth.

I made sure I had the angle right. Cops eat their guns all the time, it's their favorite single method of committing suicide, and sometimes they miss, sometimes the bullet goes on through without doing mortal damage. I wanted to do this properly, and I was only going to get one chance. I wanted the bullet to go right up through the roof of the mouth and into the brain.

When I had the gun the way I wanted it, I just stayed in position for a moment. There was something I seemed to want to say, but whom was I going to say it to?

I thought, Say it to him. And I remembered what the ICU nurse had told me. According to her, patients in coma understood what was said to them.

I said, "I'm not sure this is a good idea. But suppose you got out again. Suppose your lawyer pulled off some kind of half-assed insanity defense. Or suppose you went away for life and escaped. How can I take that kind of chance?"

I paused for a moment, then shook my head. "I'm not even sure that's it. I just don't want you to be alive anymore.

"And I want to be the one who sees to it, and that's how all this shit started in the first place, isn't it? I had to play God and frame you for attempted murder. What would have happened if I'd just let things take their course back then? Would it have made a difference?"

I waited, as if he might answer. Then I said, "And here I am playing God again. I know better and I'm doing it anyway."

That was all I said. I stayed there at his side, down on one knee, the gun in his mouth, his finger on the trigger, my finger on his. I don't know how long I waited, or what I was waiting for.

Eventually his breathing changed slightly and he started to stir. My finger moved, and so did his, and that was that.

I set the stage before I left. I got Echevarria's cuffs loose from Motley's ankles and returned them to the case on his belt. I righted the table that had gotten upended earlier and straightened out other articles disturbed during our struggle. I went around the apartment, handkerchief in hand, and removed my prints from every surface where I might have left them.

While I was doing this, I picked up a lipstick tube from the dresser in the bedroom and used it to leave a last message on the living-room wall. In block caps three inches tall I printed, IT HAS TO END. I MAKE MY PEACE WITH GOD. SORRY I KILL SO MANY. You couldn't prove it was his writing, but I couldn't see how you could prove that it wasn't. Just to keep it neat I capped the lipstick tube, got his prints on it, and tucked it into his shirt pocket.

I fastened the chain lock on the apartment's front door and left the same way I'd come in, via the window. This time I drew it all the way shut after me. I went down the fire escape, lowered the ladder, descended it. Someone had moved the garbage can to its original position, so I had to drop the last few feet, but that was easy enough.

Someone had also removed my topcoat. I thought at first someone had walked off with it, but something made me lift the lid of one of the garbage cans and there it was, reposing under a layer of eggshells and orange peels. The person who'd put it there had evidently assumed it had been discarded, and decided further that it wasn't worth rescuing. It had been a perfectly respectable coat, or at least I'd thought so, but now I figured it was time to buy myself a new one.

I thought the same conscientious tenant who'd tossed my topcoat might have removed my toothpick from the lock, but it was still in place and all I had to do was draw the door open. I retrieved the toothpick and let the door lock behind me, went on out through the front of the building, and walked over to First Avenue where I caught a cab headed uptown. I got out at the hospital's main entrance and went directly to the ICU. The nurse said Elaine's condition was unchanged but wouldn't let me go in to see her. I sat down in the waiting room and tried to look at a magazine.

I would have liked to pray but I couldn't think how to go about it. AA meetings generally close with either the Lord's Prayer or the serenity prayer, but neither seemed especially appropriate at the moment, and giving thanks for everything just as it was felt like a joke, and not a very tasteful one. In the course of things I did say some prayers, even including that one, but I don't really think anyone was listening.

Every now and then I would go to the desk, only to be told that nothing had changed and that she couldn't have anyone in the room with her just yet. Then I'd go back to the waiting room and wait some more. I dozed off in my chair a couple of times but never got deeper than a sort of waking dream state.

Around five in the afternoon I got hungry, which wasn't too surprising given that I hadn't had anything since Mick and I ate breakfast. I got some change and bought coffee and sandwiches from machines in the lobby. I couldn't manage more than half a sandwich, but the coffee was good. It wasn't good coffee, not by any stretch of the imagination, but it was good to get it inside me.

Two hours after that a nurse came in with a grave expression on her pale face. "Maybe you'd better see her now," she said.

On the way I asked her what she meant by that. She said it looked as though they were losing her.

I went in and stood at her bedside. She didn't look any better or any worse than she had before. I picked up her hand and held it and waited for her to die.

"He's dead," I told her. There were nurses around but I don't think any of them could hear me. They were too busy to listen. Anyway, I didn't care what they heard. "I killed him," I told her. "You don't ever have to worry about him again."

I suppose you can believe people in comas hear what's said to them. You can believe God hears prayers, too, if that's what you want. Whatever makes you happy.

"Don't go, anywhere," I told her. "Don't die, baby. Please don't die."

I must have been with her for half an hour before one of the nurses told me to return to the waiting room. A few hours after that another nurse came in and talked some about Elaine's medical condition. I don't remember what she said and didn't understand much of it at the time, but the gist of it was that she had passed a crisis, but that an infinite number of crises lay ahead of her. She could develop pneumonia, she could throw an embolism, she could go into liver or kidney failure — there were so many ways she could die that it seemed impossible for her to dodge them all.

"You might as well go home," she said. "There's nothing you can do, and we have your number, we'll call you if anything happens."

I went home and slept. In the morning I called and was told that her condition was about the same. I showered and shaved and got dressed and went over there. I was there all morning and part of the afternoon, and then I rode a crosstown bus through the park and went to Toni's memorial service at Roosevelt.

It was all right. It was like a meeting, really, except that everybody who spoke said something about Toni. I talked briefly about our trek out to Richmond Hill and back, and mentioned some of the funny things Toni had said in her talk.