Lawrence Block - The Girl With the Deep Blue Eyes

Only one reason to write it down, whether it was three words or every detail he could remember. All it could be, long or short, was a suicide note.

Suicide by cop?

He didn’t need to wait for a cop to turn up. He was a cop himself, wasn’t he?

Had been, anyway.

Now he was a murderer.

Two-Gun Miller, with a revolver in one hand and an automatic in the other. If he waited for them, the best he could hope for was to go down shooting. If he surrendered, if they captured him alive, the death sentence was a foregone conclusion. He’d killed two people in a particularly vicious fashion, and it would be hard for any lawyer with a straight face to argue mitigating circumstances.

And why fight the death sentence? Whatever cocktail of drugs they fed into your veins, it had to be better than life without parole. And can we skip the appeals? Florida was pretty good at killing people, and he’d make it as easy for them as he could.

Still, it wasn’t the Old West, they didn’t find you guilty on Tuesday for what you did on Monday, then drop a rope around your neck first thing Wednesday morning. Even if he greased the skids, he was looking at a year or more in a cell.

Wouldn’t welcome that.

He went to the bathroom, came back, sat down, picked up a gun in each hand. Took turns trying them in different positions. In his mouth, angled up and back, poised to send a bullet through the palate and into the brain — and, as with George Otterbein, out through the back of the skull. Pressed into his belly just below the solar plexus — much easier now, with his own hand and his own stomach, than when he’d propped up Otterbein’s unconscious body and wrapped his own hand around Ashley’s limp hand and helped her dead finger squeeze the trigger.

That wound hadn’t been enough to kill George, that’s not what it was for, and it had taken another blow to the back of the head to keep the man unconscious. Then he’d manhandled him over to the staircase, stuck George’s index finger in the abdominal wound and wiped it imperfectly.

He unloaded the Taurus, reloaded it with George’s fingerprints on the shells. Got his prints on the gun butt as well, including one from the bloody index finger. Then he’d used his own finger to force George’s thumb on the trigger.

And he’d dipped his own finger into the belly wound so that he could inscribe George’s confession on the wall. He remembered that famous case, some loony leaving messages on a mirror, Stop me before I kill more , but that hardly applied, and in the end he’d settled for God forgive me .

Fat chance.

George’s blood, but his own finger. So who then was the one seeking divine forgiveness?

Consciously, he’d been doing nothing more or less than staging a scene. But on another level...

He clamped his eyes shut, blinked the thought away. Both guns now, one in the belly and one in the mouth, and could he summon the nerve to work both triggers at the same time?

And what would Radburn and his merry men make of that?

No appetite.

At one point he went to the kitchen. There was a single English muffin left, and he split it and toasted it. Buttered it, took a bite, and the process of chewing and swallowing seemed too much of a chore, and pointless in the bargain.

Tossed it. Watched some TV.

Half an hour into the movie, he had a look at the computer. The screen had gone dark, but he touched a key and saw the open Word document.

I did it.

Nothing to add, nothing to subtract. He watched the rest of the movie and went to bed.

The third day was more of the same. He didn’t even try to eat, just sipped some water when he was aware of thirst.

Late in the day he went out of the house for the first time, but only to walk out onto the dock. He stood there looking out at nothing, then went back inside.

Went to bed again, woke up again.

And everything was different.

He got up, showered, shaved. He went to the computer and backspaced through I did it , erasing the words. His version of Word automatically backed up every document, but not until after you’d saved it once. He checked anyway, and while he was at it he cleared the browser’s history for the past week.

They weren’t coming for him. It had taken days for him to entertain the thought, but he’d somehow awakened at last with it all clear in his mind. His efforts on Stapleton Terrace, his over-elaborate staging of the scene, had actually worked to make two deaths go in the books as a murder and suicide. George Otterbein had killed his much younger paramour, Ashley Hannon, sustaining a profound but non-fatal wound in the process. And then, overcome with remorse, he’d taken his own life.

Case closed.

His every action at the murder scene had been undertaken with great care and foresight, keeping him too busy getting it right to let other thoughts intrude. And yet all along he’d carried the unvoiced conviction that he was doomed, that his role would be instantly apparent, that they’d come for him before the bodies were cold.

And so he’d arrived home and promptly fallen apart. From the moment he cleared his own threshold he was waiting to be arrested, and all evidence to the contrary, starting with Sheriff Radburn’s words on the phone, failed to change his mind.

He’d be caught, he knew it. Forensics would find his skin cells mixed with Otterbein’s blood on the wall. A neighbor who’d helpfully written down his plate number would call it in. Someone who’d caught a glimpse of him would remember an older and whiter face than you usually saw framed by a hoodie, and would pick his picture out of the six-pack they showed him. The mood that came down on him was paralyzing, and all he’d been able to do was outlast it — and, with a little more pressure on the two triggers, he wouldn’t have done so. But he was alive, and in his right mind, or as close to it as he could reasonably expect to get.

And now he had work to do.

The clothes he’d bought at J. C. Penney and worn to Stapleton Terrace, the black pants and hoodie and sneakers, were on the floor of his closet, stuffed into the shopping bag they’d come in. There was blood on them, and gunshot residue, and all manner of DNA — his, of course, and that of his victims as well.

Just sitting on his closet floor, waiting for someone to find them.

He carried the bag to his car and headed for the dump, stopping along the way for a bag of charcoal and a pint can of lighter fluid. The clerk who took his cash and rang him up volunteered that her husband had bought them a propane grill, and she’d never go back to charcoal.

“Well, y’all are modern,” he said. “Myself, I’m too darn old to change.”

There were piles of smoldering trash at the dump. He dumped the bag of clothes on one of them, and tongues of flame greeted the fresh offering. He added squirts of lighter fluid and watched everything burn.

Opened the sack of charcoal, emptied it in another part of the dump. Wiped the can and tossed it. Brought back the empty sack, added it to the fire.

Driving back, he thought, Jesus, they had their chance. Three days in his closet, a bagful of hanging evidence, right there for anybody to see.

And nobody did. So fuck ’em.

His stomach had been trying to get his attention all morning, and on his way back from the dump he was able to pay attention and grasp the nature of its complaint. He hadn’t really eaten in days.

He filled a shopping cart at the Winn-Dixie. When he got home he put everything away, looked over his purchases, and went out to Denny’s. He ordered the Hungry Man’s Breakfast and ate everything they put in front of him. Eggs, bacon, sausage, ham, pancakes, hash browns — a mountain of food, and he cleaned his plate.