Josh Bazell - Beat the Reaper - A Novel

And I, for one, want Squillante trussed as tightly as possible. Snug and waterproof as a latex dress.

When I finally stumble out of the operating room, Friendly’s standing in the hall, drinking a Diet Coke and stroking the ass of a frightened-looking nurse.

“Remember to will the thrill, kid,” he says to me.

I’m not even sure if I’m awake. I’ve gotten through the last half hour by promising myself I’ll lie down the second I can. So maybe I already have and am now dreaming.

“You’re out of your fucking mind,” I say.

“Then I’m lucky this isn’t a democracy,” he says. “It’s an ass-kisstocracy. And I’m the king.”

This last part he says to the nurse. I don’t care.

I’m already staggering past him down the hall.

I wake up. There’s an alarm going off like a truck backing up. Also a bunch of voices.

I’m in a hospital bed. I have no idea why or where. Every wall except the one behind me is a curtain.

Then my beeper and the alarm on my watch go off at the same time, and I remember: I lay down for a twenty-minute nap. In the recovery room. In the bed next to Squillante’s.

I jump up and swat aside the curtain between his bed and mine.

There are people all around him. Nurses and doctors, but also, near the foot of the bed, a pack of civilians. Aggressive family members, I figure, come to see how it has all turned out. The noise level is incredible.

Because Squillante is coding.

As I watch, his EKG stops jagging all over the place and flatlines, setting off yet another alarm. The medical people shout and throw hypodermics to each other, which they jab into various parts of his body.

“Shock him! Shock him!” one of the civilians yells.

No one shocks him. There’s no point. You shock people whose heart rhythm is wrong, not absent. That’s why they call it “defibrillating” instead of “fibrillating.”

As it is, Squillante stays dead. Eventually the ICU assholes start giving up, and pushing the civilians away to have something to do.

I try to figure out which civilian is Jimmy, the guy whose job it is to get Squillante’s message about me to David Locano in the Beaumont Federal Correctional Complex in Texas. My money’s on the guy in the three-piece suit who’s already pulling out a cell phone as he leaves the recovery room. But there are other contenders as well. Too many to do anything about.

So I go to the head of the bed and tear off the printout from Squillante’s EKG machine. It’s perfectly normal up to a point about eight minutes ago, where it starts spiking all over the place.

The spikes aren’t even close to normal. They form a bunch of “M“s and “U“s, like they’re trying to spell “MURDER.” I pick up the red “biohazard” bin and take it back around the curtain to where I was napping. Dump it out on the bed.

Even with all the used syringes and bloody gauze squares, it doesn’t take long to find the two empty vials that say “Martin-Whiting Aldomed” on them.

And which used to be filled with potassium.

Both of Les Karcher’s wives had been named Mary, though the younger one had been affectionately known within the family as “Tits.” The cops and paramedics found Older Mary in front of the house, where Skinflick and I had left her. Her skull had been crushed in, presumably by the iron stove grate that was found near her body, with (according to the Feds) no recoverable prints but a fair amount of Older Mary’s brain tissue on it. Tits, like the three male Karchers, was simply gone. [44] Look, I’m sorry to call her “Tits,” but everybody did. Even the prosecution, including one time in though it mysteriously failed to appear in the transcript. Unlike them, she hadn’t left any blood.

That the Feds would charge me with the murders of the Marys and not those of the Karcher Boys, as the father and sons came to be called, made a certain amount of sense. The Marys were a hell of a lot more sympathetic, and the Feds had one of their corpses. And if the case didn’t fly, they could always charge me with the Boys’ murders later. [45] The idea that you can’t be tried twice for the same crime in the U.S. turns out to be horseshit. You can be tried twice on the same—once in Federal and once in State court—and you can be any number of times for the same crime. For example, my own Federal trial was on charges (two counts each) of: First-degree murder; Manslaughter in the first degree; Murder committed by the use of a firearm during a crime of violence or a drug trafficking crime; Murder during a kidnapping; Murder for hire; Murder involved in a racketeering offense; Murder involving torture; Murder related to a continuing criminal enterprise or drug trafficking offense, or drug-related murder of a Federal, State, or local law enforcement officer; Murder related to sexual exploitation of children; and Murder with the intent of preventing testimony by a witness, victim, or informant. The large number of charges was designed to make sure the jury convicted me of and also to hike my potential sentence to four figures. But even then the Feds retained the option of trying me again on other charges, and of throwing me over to the State.

On the other hand, trying me for the murders of the Marys was in other ways a bad move, because I hadn’t actually done them. Any evidence the prosecution presented would be either fabricated or misinterpreted, and it would be impossible for them to disprove the “alternative explanation”: that Tits, after God knows what mistreatment over the years, had brained Older Mary and run off with the 200,000 dollars that one of the Ukrainian girls had overheard was in the house.

Let me state for the record, by the way:

Tits, if this is in fact what happened, then I bear you no ill will. Even if you were off somewhere the whole time, reading about my trial in the New York Post every day and laughing about how you could step in to save me at any time but weren’t going to—which I doubt—your actions are completely understandable.

Though I can’t swear I’d feel this way if things had turned out differently.

My “defense team” was assembled by the firm of Moraday Childe. It included, notably, both Ed “The Tri-State Johnnie Cochran” Louvak and Donovan “The Only Member Of Your Legal Team Who Will Ever Return Your Calls, Even Though Everyone Else Will Bill You $450 An Hour, Rounded Up, To Listen To Your Messages” Robinson.

Donovan, who is now a Special Assistant in the Office of the Mayor of the City of San Francisco— Hi, Donovan! —is about five years older than I am, so at the time was around twenty-eight. He was sharp but looked stupid— Sorry, Donovan! I know what it’s like! —which is exactly what you want in a defense lawyer. He did his best to help me, I think because he believed I was innocent. At least of those specific charges.

For example, Donovan was the first to pick up on how weird it was that I was being charged with murder involving torture, given that there was no evidence supporting the charge, and there was direct witness testimony from several of the Ukrainian girls that Older Mary had, if not directly participated in, then at least provided ancillary services to a couple of pretty horrific sessions. So it wasn’t a topic you’d think the prosecution would want to raise.

Donovan came to see me one day in jail—funny, I don’t remember Ed Louvak ever doing that—and said, “They’ve got something on you. What is it?”

“What do you mean?” I said to him.

“They have some piece of evidence they haven’t told us about.”

“Isn’t that illegal?”

“Technically, yes. The rule is they have to show us anything they’ve got ‘in a timely fashion.’ But if it’s something good, the judge will allow it anyway. We can try for a mistrial on that basis, but we probably won’t get it. So if you have any idea what they might have, you might want to think about telling me about it.”