Джеймс Суэйн - The Man Who Cheated Death

Rittenbaugh took the Fountain Avenue exit west to Wilton, and drove south past historic Hollywood Cemetery and the Paramount lot until he found Cicera. He took a hard right and the two detectives started reading addresses. The street was lined with three and four-story apartment houses that had been neglected beyond repair. They came to a traffic light, and Rittenbaugh jammed on the brakes.

“The address is in the next block,” Rittenbaugh said. “Do you think we should call for backup?”

Wondero considered it. With any luck, the Skylark would be parked on the curb, and Osbourne would be home. If they called for backup, there was always the chance that Osbourne would slip away, and their chance to end his murderous spree would disappear.

“Let’s get him,” Wondero said.

The light changed and Rittenbaugh let the car drift down the street. Finding the address, he double-parked, and the two detectives hopped out.

Wondero’s first steps were quick and sure. Going up the path, he halted, hitting an invisible wall. #2234 Cicera was an old gutted house, its sagging three-story frame a blackened, picked-clean carcass on a grassless plot of land.

The detectives both cursed.

Back in the car, Wondero gave the dashboard an angry punch before issuing a city-wide alert on the Skylark.

L.A. had its share of prejudice, but if any group got abused and no one heard about it, it was the elderly, especially on the roads.

Myrtle Jones had found out the hard way, her last car totaled at an intersection by a teenager without insurance. She had received no restitution, no triumphant day in court; the boy had gotten a fine, then driven away from the courthouse, while she had been forced to take a bus.

So she stayed away from cars. Only on rare occasions did she drive Mr. Kozlowski’s old Skylark, and that was because he nagged her to take it out for a spin every once and a while. The car was still registered to Mr. Kozlowski’s old address, and she was fearful of getting in another accident, and being fined for driving without correct papers.

But Mr. Kozlowski had continued to nag her. WHY LET IT FALL APART? he’d written on his tiny computer.

“Do you really want your car driven?” she’d asked him.

YES!!! he’d replied.

“How about if I let our neighbor Eugene drive it?” she said. “He asked me about the car the other day.”

GOOD IDEA

So she’d given Eugene the keys to Mr. Kozlowski’s car. Let him drive it, she thought, and I’ll stick to the sidewalks and mass transportation. A great idea, until the car had appeared in her driveway caked in dirt and something that looked like blood on the upholstery, and Mr. Kozlowski had thrown a fit.

Myrtle Jones banged on the front door of Osbourne’s home, then noticed the curtains pulled down in each window.

“Eugene? It’s Myrtle — are you in there?”

From within she heard a mournful groan.

“Eugene? Are you hurt?”

The groans grew more pronounced. She tried the door, and finding it unlocked, hesitated, knowing she should call the police. But they were always so slow, and so careless with people’s emotions. Ignoring her caution, she hurried inside.

The cries led her to the kitchen in the rear of the house. Unlike the other rooms, it was brightly lit, the sunlight streaming in from a pair of double windows over the sink. With a blanket draped over his body, Eugene lay across the kitchen floor, an empty bottle of pain killers beside him. He was shivering, his face and shoulders glistening with sweat.

“Eugene... can you hear me?” Slowly he opened his eyes, then tried to sit, the blanket falling off his naked body.

“Oh my lord,” Myrtle Jones exclaimed.

His left ankle was swollen and had turned a sickening blue. A festering wound lay in the calf of his left leg, the skin crudely sewn together with a needle and thread. Thinking she might be sick, she placed her hand against the refrigerator for support.

“Eugene — what on earth happened?”

“I went out running, and fell down.”

“Why didn’t you go to an emergency room?”

“I hate hospitals. Please help me, Myrtle. Please.”

He said her name like a little boy. Regaining her composure, she picked the blanket up off the floor, and draped it over him.

“You need to see a doctor.”

“No doctor.”

“But I insist. Your ankle looks broken, and that cut might be infected. I used to be a nurse, Eugene. I know what I’m talking about. Now, where’s your phone?”

His hands grasped her thin arms, pulled her close to him. He was amazingly strong, even in his weakened stage. “Go upstairs, and get my medicine from the bathroom. I have morphine.”

“But—”

He began to sob, his fingers squeezing the strength out of her arms. “Please say yes... please, Myrtle. Say you will.”

“Only if you’ll promise me that you’ll let me take you to the hospital.”

“All right. I promise.”

“Good. Sit tight, and I’ll be right back.”

Myrtle climbed the rickety stairs to the second floor. Down a short hallway she walked to a tiny bathroom. The appliances were old — it had been ages since she’d seen a claw-footed tub. She rifled through the medicine cabinet and read the labels. Eugene had enough pills in his medicine cabinet to open a pharmacy.

She found the morphine and headed for the stairs. In the hallway sat an old dresser with a glass bowl sitting on top. Normally, Myrtle minded her own business, but something about the bowl struck her as odd, and she stopped to have a look.

The bowl was filled with women’s jewelry. Necklaces, ear rings, and a number of thin lady’s watches. It was not the kind of collection she would have expected to find in a single man’s house. From down below, she heard Eugene moan.

“I’m coming,” she said.

“Did you find the morphine?”

She glanced at the bottle in her hand. “Not yet.”

“It’s in the medicine cabinet.”

“Be right there.”

“Hurry.”

Her curiosity had been peaked, and she pulled open the top drawer of the dresser. It was filled with women’s undergarments. She noticed they were all different brands and sizes.

This was not right. These things did not belong in this man’s house. She played back everything she knew about Eugene, and a sickening wave of nausea overcame her.

She went for the stairs. Her eyes fell upon a cracked door at the hallway’s end. She could not help herself, and stuck her head in to have a look.

She gagged. A naked light bulb dangled from the cracked plaster ceiling. In one long, slow motion sweep, her eyes saw everything that Eugene did not want her or anyone else to see: The sea of 8 x 10 black and white glossies of the dead and dying women that went up the wall, across the ceiling, and down the opposite wall, the bed with handcuffs decorating the headboard, the video camera on a tripod.

She spun around and went to the stairwell. Eugene was at the bottom, dragging his leg as he climbed the stairs.

“You shouldn’t have gone in there, Myrtle,” he said.

Jan sat with her husband in the emergency room of St. Francis Medical Center, staring at the monitors that showed Vince’s blood pressure, heart rate, and oxygen intake. Considering that her husband had been buried beneath several hundred tons of rubble for over an hour, he was in remarkably good shape.

Crystal entered the room with a can of diet soda, and handed it to her. Jan mouthed the word thanks and popped the top. They had been visited by several nurses but had yet to see a doctor.

“How you feeling,” Crystal asked her father.